I've been hunting for ten years with various detectors but didn't have any good finds at all (no silver, less than a dozen wheat pennies, etc) until I got my Etrac last May and it hasn't stopped impressing me yet. Two weeks ago I finally got permission on a site I've had my eye on for two years and yesterday was the day to finally go. I met somebody at the site to show me around, and after about four hours of nulling on my Etrac I decided that the site was a bust and I went to my backup spot. My backup spot, a park I've hunted before, yielded nothing but modern cans so I went to my second-tier backup site. About half an hour later I pulled in to the old homesite and realized that the creek separating my truck and the site was still frozen over and I didn't want to risk falling in the water, so I decided to bite the bullet and go to my "last resort" backup site. This particular park was another half an hour away, and when I pulled in I was met with a closed gate and a "Park Closed" sign. At this point I had been hunting for about six hours and was ready to throw in the towel. I drove home, and just as I was passing my road I decided to a field I had hunted a couple of times last year with no significant finds. This particular spot has an old road bed that saw troop movement during the Civil War and there was an encampment nearby. I've talked to the landowner several times and every time he chuckles a little because "nobody finds anything down there anymore". It's been an absolutely hammered site since at least the '80s, I decided to hit an out-of-the-way location across the road from the main site and found a whole lot of iron right off the bat. I started out with the stock coil but it was obvious that most of the targets were relatively shallow and the iron was making it hard to hunt so I switched to a small coil and immediately started to see results. The first target was a nice flat button, the second was another flat button, and the third.....the third target ended up being something I'm going to be hard-pressed to top. I got a nice, solid 12-46 and a good tone, and pulled what I thought was another button at first because it clearly had a small hole in one part of the disc. I got a bit of the dirt off enough to see "ONE CENT" on the reverse and got excited because it was my first recognizable large cent. I flipped it over, expecting it to be a Civil War era coin and saw that the head was facing the wrong direction! I dug a draped bust cent! The real kicker came when I was finally able to discern a date...1799! The coin is the second-rarest date/variety of that design and is easily the most valuable thing I've ever dug. The PCGS and Red Book both value a 1799 at between $4700 and $5300 depending on which variety it is (which I'm not able to see a difference in even in the "expert" pictures of very detailed coins online and in the book), and that's in AG-4 condition ("Clear enough to identify"). I know that the hole will detract from the value, but that's fine with me.
That site wasn't through producing either! About ten minutes after finding the large cent, I dug an 1806 draped bust half cent, which is a bucket list coin for me. Right as it was getting dark I also dug a fantastic Indian head penny that looks like it was taken straight from the mint in 1864 and dropped in that field. It's also an "L" variety, making it a semi-key date/variety worth somewhere between $250 and $350.
The moral of the story is that even a HEAVILY hunted site that's seen detectors for 30+ years can still yield fantastic finds if you're persistent and willing to work! I've hunted that site with two other brands of detector and found nothing but garbage. Thanks, Minelab!
Jeff Hankey – West Virginia, USA
