As is the case with many things in life, the idea that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence also applies to metal detecting. If only I lived closer to… I would find more jewelry… They have better places to detect. Older places to detect. More places to detect. The list goes on and on. Next thing you know, we are driving to a park that is one hour away, just because it is old and we heard someone found a merc, a barber, or a seated liberty there. We have to be home for another engagement in 2 hours, so that leaves us an hour to detect. One hour later we still haven’t found an older coin and we drive home with one hour to think about what we hope to find next time.
I know that I have fallen into this state of mind SEVERAL times. I’ve planned and prepared to go someplace unfamiliar, someplace new. I have come to the conclusion that at times hunting a new spot, even if every metal detectorist and their dog has dug a hole at that spot, seems to spark a hope for something better. It is as though I am now in on a special secret place. When that location doesn’t pan out, I move on and find a location that is a little farther out of the way. The problem with this approach is that it can be very flawed. Now, I am not saying that researching out an out of the way place is bad. We can make some remarkable discoveries in little known places. What I am trying to say is that in everyday metal detecting activities CLOSE GETS THE MOST.
What, exactly, does that mean? It is akin to the marketing concept that success is a numbers game. If we dig more targets, then we are statistically more likely to find more of the better targets. Let me go back to the example that I used to illustrate this principle. Take two older parks, one is 5 minute away from our home and the other is 1 hour away from our home. On any given day of metal detecting, we will lose 1 hour and 5o minutes of metal detecting time from driving. Even though we may be tempted to think that the other park is less hunted. The truth is that has been hunted about as much as any other old park, just not by us.
As a result, our odds of finding a good target with a metal detector are about the same per hour of search time. If we want to increase our overall chances of finding that good coin or piece of jewelry, then we need to spend more time metal detecting. We can do this by focusing on locations that are closer to our homes. Now I still like metal detecting at new places from time to time, but I have noticed that I find more coins and jewelry when I metal detecting close to home. In a nutshell, Close Gets the Most! Usually. Happy Hunting!