Safari Frustration: 2 Unproductive Days Beach Hunting

[ColonelDan]

I need some advice on beach settings for the MineLab Safari.

A friend and I spent 2 days hunting Cocoa Beach Florida this past weekend; he with his Excalibur II and me with my Safari. While he was finding nice rings, ear rings, car keys, assorted other jewelry and two hands full of change, I came away with about 58 cents!

I noticed my Safari would give me a single low tone signal but when I went back and swept the same area trying to locate the position…nothing…no signal. We tried throwing the 14K ring my friend found on the ground and burying it in the wet sand to see of my Safari would detect it…it did and at a variety of sensitivity settings!

After the first day, I called Steve Carr at Kellyco who sold me the Safari back in February. He advised me to get out of the auto mode and lower the sensitivity setting. I tried several settings from low to high and noise cancelled routinely. I went from dry sand to wet sand, noise cancelling each time with different sensitivity settings…nothing.

One other thing I did differently this time was to use ear buds with a plug adapter rather than the headphones that I was given by Kellyco when I bought the unit.

I decided I needed helpful advice with the Safari. Can anyone please give me some ideas as to how best set this machine up for beach hunting?

I’m posting this on several places in hopes I can rectify this frustrating issue.

Thanks

 

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[WaterWalker]

I have no experience with the Safari and you did my favorite test by putting a good target in the sand, tie a ribbon on a gold ring, and try to detect it. If you are getting coins, you should pick up at lest the silver that is in the sand. Is your coil swing level with the sand, not lifted at the end of the sweep and slow 1-2 seconds per sweep? Are you in the same good target (coin or towel) line as your friend? Lastly...you just can't walk over a target, you have to stop and dig it. Oh yes, one more...have your friend locate what he thinks is a good target and then test your Safari over it to test if you can hear it also.

Some days peanuts and other days shells.

Good luck on your next hunt.

 

[gunsil]

There is no substitute for luck!! If your Safari saw the ring well you just didn't get your coil over as good targets as your friend. He had a great day and you didn't, happens all the time, no big deal. Sounds like you are operating your machine well, and it is a very capable machine for your present application, but you still have to get your coil over a good target to find one. Every day a couple of people will hunt together at a location and one will find better items than the other. If they have capable machines and know how to use them the only other determining factor is LUCK. So good luck to you, and for sure one day you will find the goodies and someone else won't.

 

[bigscoop]

I understand your frustration but gunsil is right. I've had a couple of regular hunting partners since I first started this hobby a long time ago and you just never know who is going to have the much better day, works out that way quite often and we all use pretty much the same setups. The only way to put an end to it is to hunt alone.

 

[ColonelDan]

Thanks to all . I understand and accept the good day bad day fact of life but the focus of my post was what I may be doing wrong in setting up my Safari for beach hunting-- both wet and dry sand. What have you found to be the proper settings for the Safari in that environment? Thanks

 

[gunsil]

Too much hullabaloo about "settings". If your machine saw that gold ring you are doing it right. If you discrim out aluminum you will miss the gold. Your factory coins/jewelry mode should suit you fine just about anyplace you hunt for such things. It is said that it takes a hundred hours to learn a Safari well, so just hunt and learn, it can't be taught. A copy of Andy Sabish's book (out of print, sometimes available on ebay or Amazon) on the Safari may help you understand the machine better. If you hunt mostly beaches a high end sand scoop such as a Stavr or Stealth will help you speed up recovery. There is basically no difference to an FBS machine in dirt or beach, there are no magical "extra deep" or "more gold" settings. The machine will get a little more depth in all metal, but you will dig a lot more trash. I believe the Safari is as deep as the Excal, just get some time in on it, get the book if you can, and get lucky!! Luck is really important on those Florida beaches since there are literally hundred of others out there looking for the same thing you are. A lucky guy (or gal) with a bounty hunter or Ace 250 occasionally finds nice gold in the dry sand, although they are definitely out-gunned in the wet sand by the PIs, BBS, and FBS machines. A buddy of mine always says he'd rathe be lucky than good any day of the week!! He's probably right.

 

[DnD]

I begin each hunt by setting my machine to run in auto mode, then I test my wedding ring to ensure the machine is working. If it hears my ring....no doubt it will hear any other that was dropped within range of my coil.

If all jewelry was in one spot on the beach, we wouldn't need detectors. In reality, you have to scavenge the entire beach because something could get lost anywhere. Heck, read threads on people who try to find a lost ring for someone who "know where they lost it" and then read to see how some of these guys still search for hours or even days before finding it.

The book by Andy Sabisch is good read and may help you understand more about how targets are read by detectors, how to effectively use discrimination, and hunt when you are competing with other detectorists.

 

[ColonelDan]

Thanks again to all for the input. I appreciate your thoughts. I've decided to keep my detecting life simple and relegate my Safari to a land only role and use my Excal II at the beach. I'll have a good machine for both areas and won't have to worry about getting my Safari control box wet!

Thanks again...

 

[Sleepy]

One more thing I feel needs mentioned and I say this truly to be helpful and not insult anyone's method of hunting. I don't know how long you have been swinging a detector but I assume you're not a newbie. After Memorial Day I was out in the water hunting and watching three guys hunt the dry sand. All three had completely different methods of swinging their detector. One guy brought his coil into contact with the sand at one small spot hardly bigger than the coil itself. The rest of his swing the coil was at least a foot and a half off the ground. It looked like he was using a sling blade. Another guy was keeping his coil about the same distance from the sand but he never brought it closer than about a foot of the sand. So like everyone says, you have to go over a target with the coil to find anything. For me, I like to make sure I take advantage of every chance I have. Sometimes I try and evaluate what I'm doing in my use of my equipment just to be sure. HH

 

[Sandman]

One more thing I feel needs mentioned and I say this truly to be helpful and not insult anyone's method of hunting. I don't know how long you have been swinging a detector but I assume you're not a newbie. After Memorial Day I was out in the water hunting and watching three guys hunt the dry sand. All three had completely different methods of swinging their detector. One guy brought his coil into contact with the sand at one small spot hardly bigger than the coil itself. The rest of his swing the coil was at least a foot and a half off the ground. It looked like he was using a sling blade. Another guy was keeping his coil about the same distance from the sand but he never brought it closer than about a foot of the sand. So like everyone says, you have to go over a target with the coil to find anything. For me, I like to make sure I take advantage of every chance I have. Sometimes I try and evaluate what I'm doing in my use of my equipment just to be sure. HH

Sleepy nailed it. I once saw a guy dragging is coil behind him and when he got a signal he would stop and try to find it.

 

[ColonelDan]

I too have seen all sorts of "swing abuse." Luckily, I learned my lesson on that score many years ago...slow and level is the key. Thanks again to all.

 

[bigscoop]

"Stability"...this is really all you need to remember when adjusting any quality machine made for the environment. Adjust it until it's unstable and then adjust it back down until it's stable. Water, wet sand, doesn't really matter. Once you've done this it's just a matter of getting the coil over those targets that are within reach of the field. Sometimes I believe we over-think things, making them far more complicated then they really are. Once all of this other stuff starts getting into our heads it starts causing us to doubt just about everything and once this begins you may as well call it a day and go home. You see this start happening a lot to hunters when the targets are very slim and the other guys seem to be hitting more targets. Nine times out of ten it's because those other guys don't have all those same doubts swirling about in their head.