<p><strong>I have been metal detecting for about five years and have read about caches of coins being found but never thought I would find a cache of my very own.</strong> But that is exactly what happened to me.</p> <p>I decided to take a half day off of work to get out and do some much needed detecting with my E-TRAC. I planned on heading to an empty lot that had been scraped and produced a few nice finds for some other local detectorists including a nice 1864 Indian head penny. This is pretty old for California, especially considering the town in which it was found was not incorporated until 1885.</p>[split] <p>Well as luck would have it when I arrived at the lot, construction crews were on site working away. Luckily while I was driving to the first spot I saw another potential spot which was another empty lot where a small used car lot have been taken out. Honestly I usually don’t like hunting lots as they are usually pretty trashy with not much to show for it. But since it was so close to the first spot I decided to check it out anyway. I hunted for about a half hour or so with not much to show for it and was thinking of leaving until I found what I thought was a token or silver quarter lying right on top of the ground. I must have wasted the next ten minutes just trying to figure out what it was. I wasn’t able to tell what it was because it was so messed up but just knew that it was old.</p> <p>So I kept on detecting and about 15 minutes later I hit what would usually be a find of the year for me. It hit like a half dollar on the E-TRAC which to be honest I am really not used to seeing. Dug down about four inches to five inches and out popped a 1908 O Barber Half with a really worn Standing liberty quarter stuck to it. On the other side of the half there was a crescent shaped mark on it, so I had thought I had hit it with my shovel. It wasn’t till about 20 minutes later that I would learn that it wasn’t a shovel mark but where another coin had been stuck to it.</p> <p>Well after this I continued on knowing that I would be happy if that was all this lot produced. I mean having a barber half and a standing liberty quarter as my first silvers of 2011 was a very nice present. So I continued on detecting till I hit another half dollar/ silver dollar signal that was a bigger then a coin but was really singing on the E-TRAC. I dug out a shovel full of dirt and was met with an eye full of dirty half dollar sized coins at the bottom of the six to seven inch hole.</p> <p>I called my detecting buddy over and he couldn’t believe it, I mean we had read about finds like this but never thought we would see one for ourselves. I spent the next ten minutes expanding the hole until I had uncovered about 50 coins in various conditions with many coins stuck to each other. But the real treat was that I could see a silver dollar mixed in.</p> <p>I decided to expand the hole and found that it looked to be the remnants of a trash pit and found lots of pieces of bottles, ceramic and glass. I spent the next hour or so digging out the pit and didn’t find any more coins that day.</p> <p>It started to get dark so I called it a day, it wouldn’t be till I got home that I would really know the full extent of what I had found. After I got home I had laid out before me 40 silver half dollars, 13 silver quarters, a foreign coin, a wheatie and a cc mint silver dollar.</p> <p>It took me the next two days to get them cleaned up. A lot of the coins still have a pink stain to them which I believe is from the dirt of the trash pit.</p> <p></p> <ul> <li>1890 CC Morgan Silver Dollar</li> <li>17 Barber Half Dollars: 1898O, 1899O, 1903, 1906D, 1906S, 2X 1906O, 1908, 2X 1908O, 1908S, 1909, 1909S, 1911, 1911S, 2X 1912S, 1914S</li> <li>23 Walking Liberty Half Dollars: 2x 1917S, 1918S, 1920, 1920D, 4X 1920S, 3 X 1927,2X 1927S, 3X 1928, 1928S,4X 1929S</li> <li>5 Barber Quarters: 1901, 1907S, 1908D, 1912, 1916D</li> <li>8 Standing Liberty Quarters: 6 no date, 192X, 1926</li> <li>1917 Wheatie</li> <li>And a 1916 Kopek Russian coin</li> </ul> <p>Thanks Minelab for putting out a great product that so far has been unmatched in handling our mineralized California ground.</p>