Metal detecting in wet beach sand.?

Question

When I was metal detecting in the wet beach sand on the NC coast, my detector went crazy. The dry sand was no problem. When I detected in the wet sand or the shallow ocean water, my detector would usually detect something 8 inches below the sand almost anywhere I swept my detector. I did dig several holes and never found anything. Does the ocean water tend to give off false signals due to its salinity? Any help would be great!

Answer 1

Some metal detectors are pretty much useless on a salt water beach due to ground mineralization.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't believe your detector has manual ground balance. If it does, you may be able to cancel out the effects of the salts and reduce the chatter and false positive readings by adjusting the ground balance and sensitivity.

Some detectors have salt water or beach modes to switch to when you go from dry to wet sand or water, which is nothing more than an automatic ground balance and sensitivity adjustment.

This too depends on the type of hunting you intend to do. If you just want to hit the beaches occasionally, but do the majority of your detecting inland, then stick with what you've got for the mean time.

If you want to hit the beaches exclusively (that's where the gold is), you might want to consider an upgrade down the road.

  There are many different makes and models designed specifically for beach, water, and even underwater hunting that do an excellent job in your environment, and you may want to consider looking into those some day. If you do, stick with the major brands like Whites, Minelab, Tesoro, Fisher, etc..

I know how I get when I'm on a beach. I start out in the dry sand and slowly make my way down to the wet area, then wade into the water as far as I dare go, which I don't recommend.

I don't have an underwater machine yet, but I keep on checking out the used Minelab Excaliburs and hopefully one day I'll snag one.

Happy Hunting!

Mike

Answer 2

if you are using a simple sonar using metal detector then it will because of the way it tries to find things....

a sonar metal detector looks for changes in the in substrate, and dry sand is pretty uniform throughout so it has no problem over that kind of surface.  Wet sand however will be giving you false readings because you will be detecting that water level and it will be reflected back to the machine.  The machine will think its an object when in reality its just hte water.