After a few decades of off and on metal detecting (cheap machines), and seriously in the last few years (Minelab Safari), I got the itch to water hunt. So naturally I got an Excalibur II and ran it thru its paces a few times before heading for the nearest beach (8 hours away) in South Carolina. While hunting at low tide one morning about 50 yards from shore in 4' of water, I got a strong signal (disc = 1, sensitivity = 5-6, thresh = barely audible, volume = max) and proceeded to dig and dig and dig until I finally recovered a nylon purse stuffed absolutely full of credit/gift/rewards /etc cards at a depth of over a foot. Luckily the owner also had 2 house keys in the purse or I would have passed right over this plastic treasure trove! The downside of this find was that I didn’t have any way of carrying my the bulky thing around and had to quit detecting for the morning.
With the lady's drivers license + real estate business owner's cards, it was an easy task to find her phone on the internet and call her up. She was quite surprised, grateful, and relieved that she wasn’t going to have to go thru all the hassle of replacing all her cards that she has lost 2 WEEKS AGO. That’s right, she lost her purse in ankle deep water and it was buried some 50 yards offshore + over a foot in only 2 weeks. Keep that in mind when beach hunting- that ocean can really move the sand around quickly.
Anyway, the Detecting Gods must be guiding me as this was my second return in less than a month (see Lost My Stuff website, Return #981) after never having one in all my previous detecting years. I was also able to meet several other prominent real estate folks in the area and left them with a favorable impression of our hobby (several took down the LMS url and my email). You could tell that they were thinking that the next time someone lost something, they were going to hunt one of us up for help.
Steve - SC, USA
