All was well at the Deming Competition Hunt this year, and I am hoping to have sponsorship next year which means more and better prizes. We will have to wait and see though, because nothing is ever certain and there is a lot of change in the wind.
This group of hunters started off finding last years tokens right away and I had to raid the extra prize stash, which was great really. Keith Rickwartz walked out and eye balled a blackened mercury dime that had lain on the surface during last years hunt, and all of 2021, to be found here now at 2022. Nobody ever gets it all, and in these planted hunts its really easy to see that from year to year.
High points of this hunt are pictured here, and I myself learned a lot by networking with the dedicated hunters. My favorite part of the event was the unplanted tool check Ted Phillips found at the very end, because I have found many of those over time and they are a definite subset of numismatia/exonumia. Also two deep wheat cents were recovered this year which I did not plant. And not too much trash.
Fun was had by all, the main improvement I could see right away was the use of larger coils in hunts like these. Around half of the folks had nugget coils on their machines and thats not optimum for this kind of shallow hunting where a lot of area needs to be covered quickly.
When I hunt with a detector I like the bigger coils because I want to see what is there as fast as I can. That will dictate a change of coils if necessary, but not usually, because, if I need depth and there are smaller targets, I first need to pull a lot of the trash off the top, then tune the detector to the conditions.
My thanks to all who showed up and sorry for the disinformation you experienced. I was standing right next to some people asking one of the dgms members about the hunt and she told them I had fallen off a roof and was hurt and she thought it was cancelled even though I had spoken to her about it three days before.
I said no its not, please follow me gentlemen. I did make a note earlier, on treasurenet dot com of the malice the hunt was receiving from some of the deming-ites, and some of their fibs got called out, causing deep consternation among the evil parts.
There was one youngster at the hunt with her parents and she found one of the gold pieces. The second gold piece went unfound this year.
