Meh – Equinox 600 at the beach

I hadn’t been to the coast for a few months, since it was bad weather, and I had a temp job which I was happy to leave behind after 3 weeks. I had a need to be out on the beach so I went for 2 days, and I hoped that the sand that had built up would have gone a bit so I could find as much as previous year May. Alas..

First 3 hrs with the Equinox

As i was in a hurry and didn’t feel like putting on the Excalibur harness over my big coat, I took out the Equinox which comes in one piece, unlike my 3-piece Excalibur which needs lots of preparation :p The downside came afterwards when my arm started to hurt in 2 hrs.

Found 4 euro in 6 pieces on the dry sand. The tide was very low but i usually go out to the water and lose about 2 hrs finding nothing and/or old crap.
I went back to get my Excalibur with the 14 inch NEL coil and found the bullet near the waterline and the dry sand. Weird. Seems some old stuff is coming to the surface again.

Day 2 was hopeless. I found 10 cents and the bullet point near the towerhouse where a good patch was last year. Found 2 old Belgian coins there too.
Day 3 – it started to give some icy rain in almost horizontal direction the second I set foot on the beach :/ Went around for an hour, found 10 cent again. Eyeballed the bracelet which looked red so I thought it was copper with silver plate but after I got home and cleaned it, it turned out to be some quite nice real silver (has 2x 925 hallmark). So yay for my eyes, not the detector :/ Doh. The Equinox was killing me even after half an hour on the last day. I was amazed for not having any muscle ache after the 2x 3 hrs of detecting in the first 2 days. Even my left arm hurt during detecting from holding the scoop. I’m out of fitness, I guess. HAd to stop quite often to just be panting, and also to try to get a more comfortable grip on the Equinox but it’s an absolute horror for me. Yes, I know I’m the only person in the world that cannot swing an Equinox. Everyone else is of decent size. Strangely enough, I didn’t have as much problems swinging a 13″ Deus coil over the beach for 6 hrs, something some grown ass men complain about. I need to change the Nox’ shaft if I want to keep using it once in a while, because THIS is impossible to live with.

Since I have been going around on the beach for a year and didn’t really feel like it was working out as much as i wanted, I decided to sell at least one of my Minelab beach detectors, see next post.

the empty bullet shells all came from the same small spot next to the dunes right next to the pavement

Tips on using Minelab Excalibur

This guy seems to know what he’s talking about. I did try some things but I didn’t get the tone-inside-the-wiggle. This all probably also should work for the Sovereign as the Excalibur is often said to be just a waterproof version of it.

The good thing about these detectors is that they *null out* when going over iron. The bad thing about that is that if a Good target (a ring for example) lies right next to iron, the iron will null out the sound of the ring too. So Michael Oliver says to dig the iron too, if you have hunted the beach already quite a bit. The other guy says you should wiggle it from different directions but it doesn’t work for me.

All I know is that I can have bad low tones/low Id’s with the Deus sometimes and when dig them (when the sound IS very consistent and it seems to be a smaller object), and after some mud comes out of the hole, suddenly the tone and ID go up and a good target comes out. I think a good target can give a bad ID when it’s deep or lying in such a way that the detector only can grab onto a thin part like when a coin is just on its side. I also often have one spade out and then the signal goes missing, so then I grab the pinpointer and move it around in the hole. Often the target has fallen into a deeper bit or has it changed in to a less detectable position.

Man ALone Outdoors – how to check the null on minelab Excalibur and Sovereign
Man Alone Outdoors
Minelab Excalibur settings and more
Michael Oliver – how to use the Excalibur – settings