I’m new to metal detecting and I'm not much of a coin/relic hunter, I've dedicated my detecting time mostly to Gold prospecting with my Gold Monster 1000 and GPX-4500 so my jewellery finds lately have been more chance than anything, first a found a silver ring at a ski field using the EQUINOX 800 while I was trying to get my wife and daughter hooked on detecting by going to a place they will find coins to excite them, next I found a silver/ivory ring while detecting for gold using my GPX-4500 at a prospecting location and then today my most bizarre find of all using my Gold Monster 1000. I chose to use the GM1000 because its tiny coil was handy for quick recoveries and the area was full of junk so its discriminator would be perfect for just digging non-ferrous targets. I was itching to go for a detect as I'm all excited my EQUINOX 800's new 6" coil is on its way to my house but I had a job to do today, we bought a bunch of 20 hedging plants to put along a fence line of my back paddock. This part of the paddock is riddled with junk, lots of old rusty nails and rubbish from a point in time where there was an old farm house on the land. I was digging up all the ground along the fence line to get rid of the grass there while the soil is all soft, the frozen ground has defrosted the past week or so as we've had abnormally warm temperatures for winter and this part of the paddock normally stays frozen as it's in the shade from the fence so my wife wanted me to take the opportunity to dig up the ground ready to put the hedge. We bought all the plants last week ready for them to start to grow in spring. I hate digging there in summer as the ground goes rock hard and dry. I couldn’t miss an opportunity to detect my backyard and dig all good signals so this was the perfect opportunity. I was going to dig up the entire area anyway so I was walking along it digging up all signals with the GM1000 but it got too hard as there were so many targets so I went in discriminate mode finding any non-ferrous and just digging them rather than all targets. The weather was starting to turn as it's meant to snow tonight up on the mountains around here, it was getting windy and dark clouds approaching so I started to speed things up and stop digging any of the grass up and doing the job I was meant to be doing and just went exclusively digging non-ferrous targets along the area I was meant to be digging and I had a loud signal all the way to the right on the non-ferrous meter on the GM, I was hoping an old coin as I'd found lots of old coins in the paddock behind mine a few months ago. I decided to take photos/video of the recovery when it got interesting and I dug and found an old bit of a branch of a tree but the signal was loud and coming through the wood thinking I was about to film an old coin recovery. It turns out I had found some old gold jewellery, I think a broach. I couldn’t believe my eyes, in my old backyard I had stuck GOLD. The interesting thing is when I cleaned it up, it says Western Germany on it. Since it says Western Germany I can guess it's pretty old as now it would just say Germany. My guess is it was about 10-15 cm deep. Not only has the Gold monster found me lots of amazingly tiny nuggets now it’s found me some old gold jewellery too, fantastic machine!
Simon - Southland, New Zealand
