Post by speekergeek on Apr 29, 2004 17:02:13 GMT -5
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How Long Does It Take To Get Good?
If you read the treasure hunting magazines or scan the photos of the stuff people find daily posted to Web forums, a lot of us must surely think, "Boy, these guys must be good to find that kind of stuff." If we’re not finding that kind of stuff, well, we must certainly suck wind.
In most instances, it’s neither our detectors nor the time we’ve logged swinging a coil that is responsible for the quality or quantity of our finds, or the lack of them. After all, if you put a thousand monkeys in a room full of typewriters, they’ll eventually come up with Shakespeare or at least an episode of "Saturday Night Live." Does this make all those monkeys collectively good writers? No, it just demonstrates why someone invented the word "coincidence."
It’s easy to envy the finds displayed by our detecting confederates, especially if we’re not finding anything notable or aren’t able to do nearly as much detecting as we’d like. Months go by and everyone else is finding the good stuff while we’re going home with pocket lint and clads. Eventually we start wondering how long it’ll take us to get good at detecting so we’ll be able to find the really good stuff, too.
"Good" is not necessarily determined by the length of time you’ve been swinging a coil or the current state of your collection of finds. In fact, there are many good detectorists out there who don’t allow themselves to be really good, don’t have the time to be really good, or by virtue of where they live, don’t have the opportunity to be really good because past and present land use doesn’t support outstanding hunting. Make no mistake, though: The more you go detecting, the more you develop your skills as a detectorist. And the more time you spend at the library or historical society (and talking with the people who work for these two places of knowledge), the more you increase your chances of finding places of finding the good stuff.
Finding nothing good isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because all those outings where you find nothing teaches you a little more about how not to find nothing in the future. Much of the learning process when it comes to site selection and identifying the areas of these sites you should hunt first comes courtesy of our old friend trial and error. Spend enough time finding nothing and eventually you’ll figure out: 1) Where you’ve been screwing up all this time; 2) The patterns and common threads that are characteristic of areas that do produce within individual sites regardless of whether you’re hunting clads or old coins, or 3) This hobby has its share people telling fish tales, too. I recently bought an 1865 two-cent piece -- complete with die crack -- for $35 from a downtown Chicago coin dealer that, if I wanted, could be magically transformed into an 1865 two-cent piece dredged up from some forest homestead in my neighborhood. Not only that, but you’d be absolutely astounded at how great a job I did cleaning up that copper, too.
The key to success and personal satisfaction in metal detecting lies in finding your niche within the hobby and spending the time you need to become a whiz-bang it at, even if it means being a legend in your own mind. If you spend your time hunting alone and have fifty or a hundred dollars in dirt-encrusted change sitting in a jar at any given time, who’s to argue that you’ve become the undisputed Coinshooting King of the Picnic Grove? If it makes you happy and keeps you hunting, so what? Just don’t brag too loudly, lest another detectorist in your neighborhood who likewise thinks he’s the Coinshooting King of the Picnic Grove hears you and challenges you to a good-natured shootout. Even going best five out of seven, one of you two is going to be abdicating a throne of some sort.
Metal detecting contains several different types of treasure hunting, each requiring a completely different set of skills and metal detectors. There’s coinshooting, war relic hunting, homestead relic hunting, ghost town hunting, freshwater beach hunting, saltwater beach (surf) hunting, underwater hunting, cache hunting, dump hunting, and competition hunting. Not only that, there are guys who do nothing but work with insurance companies to recover lost items of value. It’s exceptionally rare to find someone who’s exceptionally good at more than one of these at a time. There are beach hunters who have safe deposit boxes full of rings who would be totally lost if you plunked them down in the middle of a 60-acre park for eight hours and told them to produce $30 in clad.
How Long Does It Take To Get Good?
If you read the treasure hunting magazines or scan the photos of the stuff people find daily posted to Web forums, a lot of us must surely think, "Boy, these guys must be good to find that kind of stuff." If we’re not finding that kind of stuff, well, we must certainly suck wind.
In most instances, it’s neither our detectors nor the time we’ve logged swinging a coil that is responsible for the quality or quantity of our finds, or the lack of them. After all, if you put a thousand monkeys in a room full of typewriters, they’ll eventually come up with Shakespeare or at least an episode of "Saturday Night Live." Does this make all those monkeys collectively good writers? No, it just demonstrates why someone invented the word "coincidence."
It’s easy to envy the finds displayed by our detecting confederates, especially if we’re not finding anything notable or aren’t able to do nearly as much detecting as we’d like. Months go by and everyone else is finding the good stuff while we’re going home with pocket lint and clads. Eventually we start wondering how long it’ll take us to get good at detecting so we’ll be able to find the really good stuff, too.
"Good" is not necessarily determined by the length of time you’ve been swinging a coil or the current state of your collection of finds. In fact, there are many good detectorists out there who don’t allow themselves to be really good, don’t have the time to be really good, or by virtue of where they live, don’t have the opportunity to be really good because past and present land use doesn’t support outstanding hunting. Make no mistake, though: The more you go detecting, the more you develop your skills as a detectorist. And the more time you spend at the library or historical society (and talking with the people who work for these two places of knowledge), the more you increase your chances of finding places of finding the good stuff.
Finding nothing good isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because all those outings where you find nothing teaches you a little more about how not to find nothing in the future. Much of the learning process when it comes to site selection and identifying the areas of these sites you should hunt first comes courtesy of our old friend trial and error. Spend enough time finding nothing and eventually you’ll figure out: 1) Where you’ve been screwing up all this time; 2) The patterns and common threads that are characteristic of areas that do produce within individual sites regardless of whether you’re hunting clads or old coins, or 3) This hobby has its share people telling fish tales, too. I recently bought an 1865 two-cent piece -- complete with die crack -- for $35 from a downtown Chicago coin dealer that, if I wanted, could be magically transformed into an 1865 two-cent piece dredged up from some forest homestead in my neighborhood. Not only that, but you’d be absolutely astounded at how great a job I did cleaning up that copper, too.
The key to success and personal satisfaction in metal detecting lies in finding your niche within the hobby and spending the time you need to become a whiz-bang it at, even if it means being a legend in your own mind. If you spend your time hunting alone and have fifty or a hundred dollars in dirt-encrusted change sitting in a jar at any given time, who’s to argue that you’ve become the undisputed Coinshooting King of the Picnic Grove? If it makes you happy and keeps you hunting, so what? Just don’t brag too loudly, lest another detectorist in your neighborhood who likewise thinks he’s the Coinshooting King of the Picnic Grove hears you and challenges you to a good-natured shootout. Even going best five out of seven, one of you two is going to be abdicating a throne of some sort.
Metal detecting contains several different types of treasure hunting, each requiring a completely different set of skills and metal detectors. There’s coinshooting, war relic hunting, homestead relic hunting, ghost town hunting, freshwater beach hunting, saltwater beach (surf) hunting, underwater hunting, cache hunting, dump hunting, and competition hunting. Not only that, there are guys who do nothing but work with insurance companies to recover lost items of value. It’s exceptionally rare to find someone who’s exceptionally good at more than one of these at a time. There are beach hunters who have safe deposit boxes full of rings who would be totally lost if you plunked them down in the middle of a 60-acre park for eight hours and told them to produce $30 in clad.