Owner`s manual

34
Shallow water hunting
All First Texas Products searchcoils are waterproof, allowing you to
search in shallow water up to a foot or so deep. However, if you're
searching around water, be careful not to get the electronics
housing wet. Avoid salt spray, as it will work its way into the
control housing and damage the electronics-- such damage is not
covered under warranty.
Both fresh and salt water beaches are popular places for metal
detecting. Vacationers lose money and jewelry playing in the sand
and in the water. It's usually easy to dig in a beach environment,
and metal detecting is permitted on most beaches. Once in a while
you may be able to recover for someone a piece of jewelry they've
lost minutes before, which is a gratifying experience.
When searching on a beach, it's best to either search in Self-Tuning
All Metal mode, or to use a minimum amount of discrimination,
because the value of beach finds is largely in the jewelry rather than
in the coins. You'll dig a lot of aluminum trash, but the digging's
easy so it's no big deal, and you can tell people that you're helping
to clean up the beach and make it safer for people's feet. You may
want to use a special "sand scoop" for recovering valuables from the
sand quickly-- most metal detector dealers sell these.
The electrical conductivity of the water itself can pose some
challenges. You may get false signals when going into and coming
out of the water, making it necessary to pay careful attention to
keep the coil either in or out of the water but not to touch the
surface. This effect may be observed in either fresh or salt water.
In addition, salt water is highly conductive, and produces a strong
signal which is like that of metal. When searching in salt water it
will usually be necessary to reduce the sensitivity to minimum, and
also to discriminate out iron and foil, in order to quiet the machine
down enough to make it usable.