Successful Metal Detecting In Siberia - Site Kokorino (Story 10)
Digging a Deep Hole and Recovering a Nice Siberian Coin
It was the end of a tough day, and fatigue was taking a big toll on me - I was moving like a robot with a "tunnel vision." It was time to stop and take a short break. Having spent long hours of metal detecting, It is always important to watch out for that "robotic" condition and not let it control you. I knew that I should not be moving the search coil fast if I wanted to find deep, i.e. oldest, targets.
I had a tough call, as it would happen to any operator of the Minelab Explorer in a similar field situation. I had a dilemma: either to move the coil fast, thus, digging up shallow, i.e. not very old coins while saving my last strength or to move the coil slow, detect deep targets, and therefore dig deep holes completely exhausting myself. Thinking coinwise, it would be Quantity vs. Quality (Value). Like everybody else, I had been in this situation many times before. On a couple of those occasions, I thought that I would not return to the site again and therefore went for the shallow coins, only regretting that later.
Even though I knew I would never visit this place again, I chose to follow the Quality approach. As it says somewhere in the Explorer's manual, "Prepare yourself for digging down deep." So I mobilized whatever was left of my mental and physical strength and began moving the coil very slow, focusing on the weak, incomplete or masked signals. Soon I was rewarded with a remarkable find!
It took me aproximately 20 minutes to find it in a deepest hole I had ever dug! The signal sounded very "broken" but I knew intuitevely that it was a coin. First I had to cut the dirt plug out, as deep as my shovel's blade would allow me, and then take out a small amount of soil at a time. Then I would spread the dirt on the ground and scan it thoroughly. Sergei came over to see what I was doing and neither of us could believe how deep the hole was. When I took the last load of dirt out, both of us looked inside the hole and exclaimed, "Here she is!" as we saw a Dollar size coin lying on the bottom!
And here "she" was, a nice 18th century coin, with a characteristic green patina, desirable by every one who'd be metal detecting in Siberia, nothing to say about other parts of Russia.
1778 Siberian 5 Kopecks, Mint Marks-KM-Kolyvan Mint (diameter 38 mm)
My recovery of such a deep and old coin was certainly a success - it made my day! Sergei even called up a couple of his treasure hunting buddies to tell them about my remarkable find. I knew that now they were going to change their opinion on "hunted out" sites.