New Zealand Gold Prospecting & Metal Detecting Forums Archive

I guess for most people to see someone on the beach with a metal detector is quite rare. So a metal detector can be a bit of a kid megnet. Bit like the pided piper. If their really young, you can tell them your looking for "Yellow Beard's" treasure. But pirate stories don't work for adults. What does, is if you tell them that your testing the beach for radioactivity. If on the off chance that they do beleive you, which isn't often. They look at you with utter horrer ! And when the detector goes beep, you can say, oops that's a hot spot, don't step there, just walk around that bit !
If your've got a group on the beach ,start away from them and work towards them.By the time you work your way up to them, they are used to you and usually leave you alone.
On a more serious note, I brought a new Garrett AT pro international about 2 weeks ago and have probably done about 20 hours with it. Took it out to Piha last Sunday and it worked well in the black iron sand. Perhaps a little bit harder to pin point in black sand , but very little rubbish. Aucklanders, the Auckland beaches are a disgrace ! The amount of bottle tops, pull tabs and tin foil is unreal !
In a nut shell, I would like to recommend the AT pro international. O.K. on Youtube they make it look so wonderful and they don't show you on a trashy beach bouncing from one target to another. They don't show you problems with hot rocks or materailized soils or sand. I've seen DVDs of the Minelab GPX 5000 having problems with hot rocks. But hey, thats metal detecting !
If treasure was easy to find, it wouldn't be treasure . If gold was easy to find it wouldn't be worth much.
The main thing is to get out and enjoy the outdoors. Discover what's in your local area.
If you tried to visit every beach in NZ, how long would it take ?
Happy hunting.

I think that if anyone tells someone who asks what you are doing is told a fib then they really do make a liar of themselves because the only people who dont readily recognize a metal detector nowdays and know what you are doing are straight out of the Amazon jungle...and I have not met anyone straight out of the jungle for many, many years!

Thirty years ago the only questions I was asked all related to money, valuables and other treasures as people knew what a metal detector was even back then. I dont think one person ever asked "What is that thing?" other than wee kids who had never seen one. All adults knew what my old Garrett was.

If anyone asked then I always told them straight up what I was doing.

Yup, I often get asked what I'm doing. Most of the time it is overseas tourists that come straight out and ask, but you can tell a lot of Kiwi's want to ask but for some reason hold back and don't approach. When detecting on the beach my normal answer is "weed eating to stop sea grass taking over the beach", have had a few people fall for it.

Once the ice has broken I fill them in and am quite open in telling them about my finds. One thing I always try to do though is to stress the recoveries I've done so it puts the hobby in a good light. But I would prefer if nobody asked as it can seriously cut into detecting time when one person after another approaches me. This is the main reason I detect after hours and at night.

hi all,yes i,m often asked what am i looking for,sometimes i just like to have fun and reply with,bombs and bullets!!,and then people want to know if i,ve actually found some!! it can be very funny.