You Can Find Gold: With a Metal Detector: Prospective and Treasure Hunting

The improvements in technology have corresponded inversely to the number of prospectors. Erosion during the past century has exposed millions of tons of virgin substrata for prospectors of today, and metal detectors will increase the chance of discovering new placers. There's no better expert on metal detector technology than Garrett. Great as those detectors are, they require some training to use them. Garrett provides the best 'how-to' advice available. His book will give you the straight-forward means to practice with it before you begin trekking into the canyons or sweeping old school yards for coins. Learn how to do it and you still mightn't find gold, but you'll certainly find the greatest treasure of them all: solitude.

Our family has been in something of a cash crunch since the late 1970's, so the jaunty optimism in this book's title caught my eye the moment I spied it on a local shelf. It was written by the doyen of metal detection - Charles Garrett, creator of the eponymous Garrett Infinium LS detector, as well as the "ultra-advanced, deepseeking GTI 2500," among many others. His book is a sober introduction to the art of wealth accretion by way of magnetic broom. All is covered, from the first "bench test" before a detector's maiden search, to techniques for keeping the search coil level, to the famous "screw-driver probe" for pinpointing buried objects. Shortly after I bought this book my four-year-old son and I passed a pleasant afternoon on a Chatham beach seeking to re-enter the ranks of the upwardly mobile. By nightfall our plunder included an oversized wing nut (almost certainly from a pirate's ship, I assured my son), three discarded soda cans (good for fifteen cents, or twice that should we make the journey to Michigan, where one can gain double the local redemption rate through ruthless arbitrage), and three pennies that my son regularly planted in front of me to allay his boredom and my flagging spirits. All told I expect that we would have found more precious metals by combing the beach with a Geiger counter, and certainly would have had more success at spooking the locals (as it was, my cover story of being a minesweeper on secret business for Tom Ridge had few takers).