<p><strong>My hunting buddy Steve has a spot he'd been working over with good results for relics in the past and we'd also worked it over many times as a team on top of that.</strong> We'd moved on to some other areas but Steve said he had a feeling we should go back over it again. Well, it pays to listen to your hunting bud so off we went Steve, my wife and I.</p> [split] <p>It had been raining and the ground was damp as opposed to the normally dry conditions we'd hunted in there before. After a short time swinging my E-TRAC in a sandy area I hit a spot with all the signs of multiple targets. I was getting numbers all over the spectrum and all kinds of sounds from lows to highs in a small area. Slowing down to a crawl with an open quick mask I heard some interesting sounds in between all the iron. So my wife, a true blessing as she loves to dig targets, started in and hit some iron trash at about 7”. Pulled it and I reswung the hole finding more targets and we kept going. As we started cleaning out the iron the good stuff started showing up. A few old jewelry pieces came up first.</p> <p>Then we found a small skeleton key, some suspender hardware and some trunk hardware along with more iron bits and some broken pink glass, mason jar lids as well as an unbroken pink glass lid. Then I got another target down about 10” on the edge of the hole and brought up a US army collar insignia with an intact pin back but unfortunately missing the dot after the “S”. Still a cool find.</p> <p>We kept finding more iron trash as the hole got deeper and wider and we ended up about 14” deep and wide but several feet long.</p> <p>The best was saved for last though. When this came up at first under the all the dirt we thought it was just a corroded piece of sheet metal. A few swipes to clean the dirt though and the best surprise came to view.</p> <p>A Victorian Era ladies sash buckle in brass. What a find and in one piece!!! One of the dark blue glass accents is intact and one is missing. There would have been another mirror half with the tongue part of the connector but it was not in the hole. We'll be going back there some more for certain. </p> <p>We had swept this area numerous times in the past with both the E-TRAC and two other machines and had dug lots of targets around it. Steve has a nice assortment of relics from the immediate area. But we had never hit on the deeper targets there until everything was right, from Steve's “feeling” to wet ground and an E-TRAC giving me those tantalizing signals among all the trash! </p> <p>So the old lessons holds true, no where is ever hunted out and when your hunting partner has a hunch, listen!</p>