Learning to read beaches

maxxkatt

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If you live within 2 hours from a beach and want to beach hunt please do yourself a favor and learn how to read beaches. Even if you just go to a beach once a year for 3-5 days on vacation learn to read beaches.

It will improve your find rate by a factor of 10x or more.

As an example there is a guy who hunts a specific beach in Florida. I know that beach and have hunted it. This guy has about 60 youtube videos and at the end of each he shows his finds. There are almost always coins, bottle tops, pull tabs and fishing lures. There are almost never any lead weights. Maybe on one of them I saw a very small lead weight not much bigger than a pea.

Learning to read beaches is not that hard. Just do some research. Someone who knows how to read beaches would never keep hunting a section of a beach that is just producing light metal. He would keep moving until he started finding a lot of heavy items like bigger lead sinkers and jewelry. Why waste your time digging those light items in the wrong areas of the beach or wrong beach?

And from what I can tell he is hunting the public beaches and ignoring the expensive hotels and condos beaches.

So watch a few beach hunting videos and notice these things. The guys who are pulling in the valuable diamond rings are not on public sections of beaches but are in front of expensive condos and hotels. They also know when a beach is sanded in (bad) and it is eroding (good). There are other things about reading beaches but just these two will increase your odds at finding valuable rings.
 
Can't always go by sinkers this time of year. I been detecting a long time and it is rare to find sinkers where i hunt right now. Which is all over. I will also say i do know a couple guys here who can't read a beach to save their life. But they get lucky up in the dry sand farting around. But they will see where you are hunting and try to work the same line you are in. Thats why when you see them you work where you want them to be and then move to where you really want to be.:lol: Also i actually do really well at public beaches.:shock:
 
No problem with me if the other guys can't read the beach :D IMO its the circle of life, some people want to do better, some are fine with the status quo. Those of us that want to do better, read books, watch youtube videos, read forums, even a little science related to erosion, wave patterns, tides etc comes into play.

For example, I spent about 2 hrs the other day reviewing 3 months of surfcam clips from a website, comparing the erosion to the tide cycles etc. Md'ing is one hobby where doing research and trying to do better usually pays off :)
 
There's a really good pdf I downloaded sometime ago that tells you literally EVERYTHING about reading beaches. It's an awesome book and contains heaps of annotated pics of beaches. Well worth a read. I can't find the original website where I downloaded it from, but if you want it, send me a PM and I'll be more than happy to email it to you. :) Here's a pic of the booklet:
 

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Enroll at a Sedimentology class at your local college or just get the texts and study them if you want to understand how particles move in water. My sedimentology class was hands down the most informative geology class I ever took. Every minute was packed with interesting information, and not just relevant to metal detecting.




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There's a really good pdf I downloaded sometime ago that tells you literally EVERYTHING about reading beaches. It's an awesome book and contains heaps of annotated pics of beaches. Well worth a read. I can't find the original website where I downloaded it from, but if you want it, send me a PM and I'll be more than happy to email it to you. :) Here's a pic of the booklet:

This may be where you got it. http://www.mdhtalk.org/tutorials/beaches/metal-detecting-beaches.pdf
 
Every area is different and the best is just get out and get to know your/that beach's habits. It's like every beach I hunt I have to reload a program just for that beach from past experiences, in my head. Then add to that program each trip back.

“The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.”

― Albert Einstein


Time to go learn more...
 
The guys who are pulling in the valuable diamond rings are not on public sections of beaches but are in front of expensive condos and hotels.
+1... I say GO FOR IT!! Chances are you'll arrive and be elbow-to-elbow with 20 other guys using the best metal detectors available. Of course
you'll be fighting over crumbs since folks that can afford nice stuff, usually have enough IQ to remove and store their valuable jewelry in the condo/hotel safe.

Meanwhile, the Jersey Shore guys are flashing their bling, getting drunk, and trying to impresses the college girls sunbathing at the public beach. That's where you'll hear about some dude with a bounty hunter that stumbled across a 50g gold chain :lol:

I'm just pulling your chain M/K. Jewelry can be found anywhere. Like you said, learn how to read "YOUR" beach and you'll increase your finds.
 
Every area is different
^^^ Absolutely true!

Florida beaches, visitor patterns, tides, and sand/rock vary like night and day. You may need to use complete opposite strategies at two beaches that are only 20 miles apart.
 
+1... I say GO FOR IT!! Chances are you'll arrive and be elbow-to-elbow with 20 other guys using the best metal detectors available. Of course
you'll be fighting over crumbs since folks that can afford nice stuff, usually have enough IQ to remove and store their valuable jewelry in the condo/hotel safe.

Meanwhile, the Jersey Shore guys are flashing their bling, getting drunk, and trying to impresses the college girls sunbathing at the public beach. That's where you'll hear about some dude with a bounty hunter that stumbled across a 50g gold chain :lol:

I'm just pulling your chain M/K. Jewelry can be found anywhere. Like you said, learn how to read "YOUR" beach and you'll increase your finds.

David,

you know your ocean beaches. so should everyone who hunts beaches. and anyone can find anything at any given time. But the guys who live close to the beaches with good machines and know how to read beaches and put in the hours find more good stuff. Just common sense.

This summer I hunted a beach on a large lake north of Atlanta exactly 3 times, all in waist deep water. two trips, nothing but clad and junk. The last time after labor day a nice heavy .925 Tiffany's bracelet. Lake beaches don't change daily like ocean beaches. That particular beach is hunted almost every day by one guy I know and in the water. I guess he just missed it. We cannot find all the stuff. My coil that day just happened to be over the bracelet.
 
There's much, much more on that site. Check all of the links above. After posting that site, I'm now reading this again...

http://www.mdhtalk.org/articles/beaches/research/WavesCoastsChapter.pdf

R5

Yes man, thats what I was talking about. It goes i to detail about wavelengths and longshore drift. I feel I'm getting smarter but the changes here on the gulf are so subtle it is hard for me as a beginner to say, yep that spot will hold some heavy stuff.... I do know of some things to look for but I'm still learning. I do feel I'm spending too much time hunting and too little finding as of late but hey its just a droubt.:roll:
 
Ive been at this more than a day now. Im not the guy who .... looks at a beach on his lunch hour and says theres the gold...... and shows pictures of 3 or 4 golds. That normally comes from a beach with a lot of contributors during peak times..... maybe.

Im the guys who knows my beaches. If you spend enough time on them you see what the people are doing and which way the winds are blowing the waves. You learn... if you are chasing recent drops to cover as much beach as you can because gold is where you find it in those situations. You can tell in the water where the sand has moved ..... an when you run into target to grid it well. I spend a good 7 hours at it and do as much of the water as possible.... meaning i covered those areas someone reading a beach hit.... but if its not there what does he do then? The same thing i started my day out doing. Once you learn your beach you learn areas that tend to be productive as well. YOu also have some idea when to be hunting waist deep instead of neck deep....based on how high those tides were all day.... which kept people shallow. Ive seen hunter recent drop hunting neck deep just because today was a super low tide..... and they over shoot where the gold was based on yesterday. Im not saying reading a beach isnt good....... im saying ive not got that nack. So if i go to a NEW beach.... or one i rarely hunt i do the same thing...... hunt hard.
 
I have never equated lead weights with gold... sure I have pulled gold from area's with weights... but I do better hunting the rocks in the gold dept... 90 percent of the gold I find isn't even in the water... its upper slope where the mommies like to sit with their little ones, mid slope, bottom of slope and the edge about 10 feet out from the bottom of the slope.. I also mainly hunt shall we say defunct beaches... they may have been beaches at one time decades ago but today are nothing more than a place to get a sun tan or walk the dog..

You will rarely see me hunting a fresh drop beach.. just yesterday I hunted a beach I noticed good sized rocks had been moved by wind and waves... found no gold but I didn't stay long either... did manage to find silver coins.. I don't even know how many as I left my pouch in my truck. Maybe I will post them later.. maybe not :lol:

I chuckle at people who can look at a beach and say its sanded in then not even try hunting it.. it may look sanded in but that sand had to come from somewhere and usually its from out farther... I recently took Swinglow to a beach that was sanded in by looking at it but I knew that meant there was a ground down area somewhere which I found and invited George to hunt it with me before he vanished over the horizon :lol: I was very happy he got gold.. I don't need to find gold every time out to have a good time..


Disclaimer: I am not talking about beaches that are replenished... I'm talking about our Connecticut shoreline... :D
 
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