Tired of cutting plugs in hard soil? Then you should definitely consider metal detecting beaches with your Garrett Ace 250. Digging in sandy beaches is much easier than recovering targets at the park and you are more likely to make some awesome finds.
With the right tools, such as a beach sand scoop, target recovery couldn’t be any faster unless the coin was lying on the surface of the ground. If you will spend more than a day or two metal detecting on a beach, then it is well worth it to purchase a sand scoop. Plastic scoops are less expensive, but they wear out fast and can easily break. You can purchase a decent aluminum sand scoop for around $25 that will last a long time.
A great benefit of metal detecting beaches is that you stand a lot better chance of finding gold jewelry than you would in other settings. Sun screen and sun tan lotion make it easy for rings to slip off fingers and all too often someone will shake off their towel, tossing forgotten valuables into the sand.
When metal detecting at the beach, it is important to run your Ace 250 in all-metal mode. Because it is so easy to recover targets, you will want to dig everything including the trash as some of the smaller gold rings and pendants will id in the foil and pulltab range on the Ace 250′s target id screen.
While you can find lost jewelry and coins just about anywhere on a well visited beach, areas close to the water tend to produce more finds. The reason for this is that when a person’s hand gets wet, the cold water causes their fingers to shrink some and can become very slippery when using lotions.
Unfortunately, saltwater and minerals concentrated in these wet areas can cause the Ace 250 to false a lot. If the wet sand areas on the beach that you are metal detecting is too mineralized, then you will be better off staying on the dry sand. If, however, you can get close to the water without a lot of falsing, then it is worth spending some time detecting this area.
Lowering the sensitivity on your Ace 250 metal detector can help reduce the falsing over wet sand, but it will also decrease your detection depth. At some freshwater beaches, you may not even have a problem metal detecting the wet sand.
In the dry sand areas, some good places to metal detect are the volley ball courts, the towel line, along paths leading to the parking lot as well as areas near food stands. It can be helpful to visit a beach during the busy season see where the people congregate. Sometimes, you can also find satellite images on google maps that shows a beach during the busy season. The people will only appear as little dots, but you can see where they hang out.
Related Garrett Ace 250 Articles:
Ace 250 Discrimination & Target ID (TID)
Metal Detecting Ballfields with an Ace 250
Gold Nugget Hunting with the Garrett Ace 250
Relic Hunting with an Ace 250 Metal Detector
Water Hunting with a Garrett Ace 250
Garrett Ace 250 Silver Coins & Jewelry Tips