[split] <p><strong>On Saturday April 4th I joined Barry Small and The Artifact Detecting Team (ADT) a Minelab Sponsored treasure hunting team.</strong> I as a Minelab dealer was asked to represent Minelab at these events. The ADT is the first of its kind in the U.S.A. The ADT is working in conjunction with the Southampton Historical Society. In the past no historical society has ever considered allowing a metal detectorist on a historical site. As you may know many nonprofit organizations are losing their government funding, so Barry thought it would be a good idea if detectorists would be allowed to hunt historical properties for a fee. That fee would in turn be donated to the historical society to help them fund projects. This is a winning situation for all. Detectorists would be able to hunt land that was never available to them and in turn the historical society would gain monies to help in the completion of unfinished and future projects. What a great idea.</p> <p>I arrived at about 9:00 AM and I was joined by about 25 other detectorists. There was over 50 acres of land to be hunted, so I headed out to an area that I thought would be productive. I turned on my E-TRAC and made a few custom adjustments that I thought would give me an edge over the soil conditions and then I set out to hunt. I decided to work up and down the planted rows of trees and not wonder indiscriminately. Slowly I took my time as not to pass over any deep targets. There were many hits but mostly junk targets. After about an hour and a half my patients paid off. I got a signal and removed a plug of dirt. Stuck to the bottom of the plug was a silver coin. At first I thought it was nothing special but as I cleared away the dirt I saw something that I had never seen before. On closer examination I saw the date 1676. This was the oldest coin that I have ever found in my 30 years as a treasure hunter. My slow methodical pace proved to have paid off. At the end of the day I had come up with several nice keepers. Here is a list of my finds 1676 French 4 sols, 1875 seated dime, 1914 Barber dime, large cent with no date, Indian head cent with no date, 6 buttons and 3 musket balls.</p> <p>Thank you Barry for coming up with this great idea. You have opened up some large parcels of land that would normally not have been available to our hobby</p>