People who use a metal detector are often called upon for assistance. In bigger cities, detectorists are occasionally called upon by law enforcement to help locate evidence, such as spent bullets. Many times, the call is to assist someone in looking for a lost ring or stashed valuables.
Recently, I had such a call from a retired lady seeking help in finding lost valuables. Her husband had been a survivalist and had passed away some months back. He had stashed some gold coins in a 5,000 sq. ft. warehouse on their home property. He told her to “go to the back and turn right.” That was all the treasure map she had to go on, and after some searching on her own, she called me for help. In that corner of the warehouse, there were two big shelves filled with boxes and a full pallet of boxes. These were where she thought the bounty was hidden, in a coffee can, inside a box.Most of all of these boxes were filled with hardback books, with a miscellany of other things in them, too. I started with the pallet of boxes, scanning it with my MinelabCTX 3030. If it had a gold or silver reading, I would open and search the box. The first morning, I had only two hours available to hunt. In the first pallet, I got a box with a strong silver reading. Opening it, I discovered a small box inside the bigger box. In this box, I found about $800 of coins, mostly buffalo nickels. There were 15-20 ounces of silver coins from around the world. This was not what she was looking for, but it was a nice surprise.
Having to go to work in my metal detector shop, I asked if I could bring some help so that we could look some more. She thought that was a great idea, so we set a date to search again on Monday, May 25, not realizing it was Memorial Day.
Kelly Mims and I arrived about 7:30 that morning, before it got too hot in the stuffy warehouse. Working together, we began to scan each box from the shelves with the new Garrett AT Pro Pinpointer, set to its maximum sensitivity. Some boxes had only books, so by scanning them we could set them aside without opening them. If the pinpointer went off, we opened and searched the box. This new pointer is very sensitive! In one box, there were five legal pads. The staples in the pads were the only metal in the box, but they made the pointer sound off!
After two hours of this work, with me scanning and Kelly opening and searching, Kelly said, “I think we may be in business.” He pulled out a peanut can and a small box of the type that holds coins in 2×2 holders. Our new friend happened to be standing there when this happened. Her immediate reaction was “there should be a hundred. I don’t think they are all there.” I disagreed with her. I could tell that the 2×2 box would hold at least 40.
After we began to count, the can held about 50 gold coins. They were wrapped in the receipts, in threes, from when they were purchased. As we begin to count those from both the can and the box, there were 109 gold coins—Krugerrands, American gold eagles, Austrian gold, and so on. Of these, 103 were one ounce and 6 were half ounce. This made a total or 106 ounces of gold, a value of $127,000!
All three of us were very excited about this great find! The widow was ecstatic because she called it her “pension fund” and Kelly and I because gold is always at the top of a detectorist’s target list.
Metal detecting is a fascinating hobby. It provides good exercise, and it gets you out of the house. You will become hooked on local history as you search for old sites to hunt. It is one hobby that actually pays for itself as you find valuable items, as well as brass, copper, lead, and aluminum, all of which have value at the metal recycling yard. Contact me if I can help you get started!
Pictured above are Bob Turner (left) and Kelly Mims (left) along with their find of the day. Below is a close up of the coins gathered.
