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Easter silverfest :-)
Zot
Posts: 825 ✭✭✭
After three months abroad without metal detector, I was eager to get back into action during my Easter trip to Finland.
The snow has melted (and the ground too) in southern Finland, so I was good to go.
Friday, April 6
My long break caused at least one glitch in the system: I forgot to bring my camera along....
For an idea of the site, you can imagine one of those many forest pictures I've posted before...
I started off by checking the area that yielded two rings in VTH3. Unfortunately, the well has run dry now; I was digging everything I could hear (which wasn't much, very iffy signals mainly), but came up with nothing. Not one coin or interesting relic in about 3 hours.
I now call that spot finished.
Moving to another site that has been productive in the past, things improved somewhat as I picked up two late 1800's coppers (5 penniä ).
My silver hopes were rising..
About an hour later, I got a signal that I immediately felt could be a good one. Bouncing around a bit in the bottlecap range and not ringing all that well from all directions was screaming "junk", but it was also screaming "silver 25 or 50 penniä" at the same time (it's a bummer that our smaller and thinner silver coins often drop down into the trash range, 25 penniä silvers are even worse - very unpredictable). The 7 inches of depth the signal had to it spoke for the silver option...
And a moment later....
Silver 50 penniä 1872
This is a fairly tough date with a mintage of 200,000 pieces. I'm very happy with this one!
A short while later, an exceptionally deep pulltab signal:
Silver 25 penniä 1901
In brilliant condition! This is exactly how it came out of the ground, only rinsed with water.
A Totenkopf ring.
This got me really excited for a moment, as I thought it might be a genuine WW2 piece. Unfortunately, it appears to be of crappy modern manufacture. The inside of the ring is very crude and "cheap" looking. There are two low quality stamps stating "84" and "AR", on the back side of the ring (on the outside), which I haven't figured out the meaning of yet.
Saturday, April 7
After such a long break, I now feel all too well that MD'ing (and the bicycle riding that goes along with it) are at least a bit of exercise...
Today almost everything hurts: My a$$, thighs, lower back, right arm, right hand palm (from pushing the digging tool), etc.. Hrmph!
It didn't stop me from going out though, and this time I remembered to bring my camera along.
I started by going to the location where I got the two silvers yesterday.
I thought I'd hammered it pretty well, but you never know... The previous result was so good that I wanted to have another go at it.
Here you can see the area where I made yesterday's good finds. I detected an area much larger than this in total, but the good stuff was close together. One of the silver coins + the ring were in the middle of a footpath, and the other coin was close to it as well.
I got almost completely skunked for four hours. I think I had two coins in total, and certainly no silver, so I changed location.
Things improved a bit, and I got a few more coins there.
I had set the ambitious target of a silver and was thinking "come on... just give me one of those and I'll be outta here".. The wind was brutally cold and I wanted to call it a day. I was getting a bit tired too, as digging here was a pain because of the hopelessly many roots I had to dig through and around.
I just hate it when you have an 8" deep signal and push down the digging tool, only to find a hard stop less than 1" down on all sides of the target....
Finally I got a great signal. Six inches deep, VDI bouncing between +20...28 from one diretion and +70...74 from the other.
Slightly broken signal that required low discrimination to sound properly. The perfect signal for a thin silver.
Here I've just swept my pigskin-covered fist in front of the coil and the signal is red hot in my hand!
Won't be long now...
No target in sight. That's good news. One thing I quickly learned in detecting was that seeing green, red or blue color is very bad news...
Yeah!
And here it is, a silver 25 penniä 1894
In 1894, 25 penniä was approximately an hour's average wage.
Overview shot of where it was found
That was my last target of the day.
Sunday, April 8
OK, here we go again - target set on silver.
This has been the first time I've been silvered on these Finnish coins two days in a row, but one can always hope for a third as well..
After about an hour I get this unusual sight in my plug:
A silver cross (0.813 fine)
Fast forward an hour or so. A perfect signal for a small silver!
And indeed:
Ha! It's the sister of yesterday's coin. Another silver 25 penniä 1894. (The bump on the reverse is not digging damage)
A small olympic pin with the German eagle holding the olympic rings.
I think this is from Berlin, 1936 (where the official logo has a similar design). I haven't been able to find this exact design on the web though (and have Googled myself silly...)..
That's most of it. Not too bad in the silver department
There are a few other things too, but they require cleaning...
Thanks for looking! Happy hunting!
-Z
Minelab: GPX 5000, Excalibur II, Explorer SE. White's: MXT, PI Pro
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Comments
Jerry
Very nice finds.
G.
Thanks for the ride-along!
Fun to see where the coins come out of the ground... coins found next to old paths where you'd love to see what the people looked like passing by 100+ yrs ago, or the thought of one of them spying a nice tree to sit under (and dropping a coin for Zot of course
Get back out there and find some more for us!!
The squirrel with the camera is real funny
WTG on three in a row!! Getting skunked is the only thing I've done three days in a row.
Yes, I was really lucky to get silvers three days in a row.
Right now is about the best time of the year for detecting here, so I tried to get in as many hours as I could.
In the summer, these sites will be quite heavily overgrown, and it will be much harder to get the coil close enough to the ground to find the deeper targets...
Not to mention the mosquitos..
You didn't enter them on the poll nomination thread!!
And I already awarded the Best Non-US Coin to SilverDreams by default, for his 1929 Brit penny, since that was the only entry!
In fact, very few people put their finds on the poll entry threads this month, making it a rather slow month.
But at least we got your usual great narrative post and a squirrelly picture.
Well, I reckon Steve deserves recognition for his Brit large penny, which is a neat find for this side of the pond. You pretty much get a near-monopoly on the Non-US category every month, so maybe you deliberately bowed out? I noticed The Mighty Phut also did not enter his usual cool finds, though he did post them.
Congratulations! You missed out on a trophy plaque for your sigline, but knowing you, you'll have plenty of other opportunities for that.
Edit- never mind. This is April stuff, and I am doing the March polls. Duh.
<< <i>Aaargh. You didn't enter them on the poll nomination thread and I already awarded the Best Non-US Coin to SilverDreams by default, for his 1929 Brit penny, since that was the only entry! >>
I believe this was the March poll, and my recent stuff was found in April, as was Phut's recent Victoria 5c...
Oh.
I just got off graveyard shift and John is down with kidney stones and unable to post 'em. Forgive me- I am doing a hasty job of it and am a bit rusty.
Well, maybe you WILL get a trophy plaque for April.