Metal Detecting in the Southern Ural Mountains
Everything was fine except we were not getting any coin signals. All we could get were just the low tone signals from modern iron junk. We dug up a few most obvious items: farm tractor and other machinery parts, rusty tools, fragments of iron sheets, and horse shoes. Not even an old button!
We tried to recover at least one more keeper to no avail for three hours. When it got absolutely dark and the rain started to sprinkle, we decided to call it a day and return to our camp.
Right before I turned my machine off, I suddenly got a weak coin signal. I had to use my headlamp to recover it form the dirt. It was a coin! Too bad it was just a 1940 Soviet 1 Kopeck. Though Vadim and Natasha got really excited, it was time to go.
When we got back to the camp, we were cold, wet, and tired but I noticed that my friends were still in high spirits - a good sign of being mentally strong enough to deal with extreme conditions which they probably had never faced before.
Fortunately, making a campfire was not a problem. And we had some real spirit, a bottle of Russian vodka, to keep ourselves warm and cozy! So we gathered around a comforting warmth of fire and toasted to our luck in search for treasure (whatever it could mean for each of us).
The morning greeted us with gray sky and cold temperature. I decided to use my Explorer with 7-1/4 inch coil in hope of getting in between the shallow iron targets underground and detecting the deeper and, therefore, older ones.
Ready For Action
Vadim and I worked in tandem: I was detecting and he was digging. The closer we were getting to the monastery, the more junk signals I was hearing in my headphones.
Now they were not just iron targets but numerous aluminum bottle caps and pieces of aluminum wire. I had to dig them all as they would give nice and clear coin signals! That was a nightmare that overshadowed a discovery of another early Soviet coin, 1925 Silver 20 Kopeks. We did not even know it was silver until I cleaned it at home later. A few other Soviet coins were found but no older coins.
After that silver coin was found, all we found was the modern junk, tons of it! I wished I had a smaller coil! We had to change our plan not to waste the rest of the day.