Bill D. (VA)
Silver Member
My good friend Evan is in town visiting for a few days, and my regular hunting buddy Dan joined us for a fun day of hunting at a couple of our well-hit sites. The day started out on the very wet side with a number of heavy downpours making for miserable hunting conditions, but things finally made a dramatic improvement by midday. After not digging many targets for the first 2-3 hours, I was quickly passing through an area well-removed from the house site and on a slope, and was suddenly startled by a nice sounding hit. It was too high for cut silver, and I was thinking more along the lines of a musketball or large brass button. But when I flipped the dirt out of the hole I could see the faint glint of a silver edge, and upon closer inspection could make out the telltale corded edge confirming this would indeed be spanish silver. And what a nice one it was - a 1729 one reale with near perfect detail!! Although I've dug almost 90 cut pistareens, I can count all the whole ones I've recovered on the fingers of one hand. So this was indeed a special find for me.
Later we decided to take Evan to another site that we've hit really hard over the last 2 seasons, but for some reason the once barren area in and around the iron patch started singing out with signals. We couldn't figure out why that was happening, but we weren't complaining. Although most were deep and iffy signals, nearly all of the recoveries were keepers. Not long after I helped Dan fill in a shallow fire pit we'd been investigating, I got a tight and very obvious signal that initially was reading in the mid-60s on my F75. Once I opened the hole and had the target out, it read a little lower at about 60. Not sure what to expect, I broke open the dirt clod and staring back at me was yet another piece of colonial silver - an early 1700s cut pistareen. So although my overall finds for the day weren't all that great in terms of quantity, I was quite pleased with the outcome. At the end of the day I came home with colonial silvers #8 and #9 for the season (177 & 178 overall), and I now have a fighting chance to hit double digits again this year. I had a great day of fun and comradery, and everyone returned home happy and with a nice pouch full of goodies.
Sorry, but the pics were (again) improperly ordered after the upload.
Later we decided to take Evan to another site that we've hit really hard over the last 2 seasons, but for some reason the once barren area in and around the iron patch started singing out with signals. We couldn't figure out why that was happening, but we weren't complaining. Although most were deep and iffy signals, nearly all of the recoveries were keepers. Not long after I helped Dan fill in a shallow fire pit we'd been investigating, I got a tight and very obvious signal that initially was reading in the mid-60s on my F75. Once I opened the hole and had the target out, it read a little lower at about 60. Not sure what to expect, I broke open the dirt clod and staring back at me was yet another piece of colonial silver - an early 1700s cut pistareen. So although my overall finds for the day weren't all that great in terms of quantity, I was quite pleased with the outcome. At the end of the day I came home with colonial silvers #8 and #9 for the season (177 & 178 overall), and I now have a fighting chance to hit double digits again this year. I had a great day of fun and comradery, and everyone returned home happy and with a nice pouch full of goodies.
Sorry, but the pics were (again) improperly ordered after the upload.
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