I love to hear relic hunting stories , especially shell hunting stories so I’m going to start off this thread with one of my stories.
When I was a kid I wanted a metal detector in n the worst way but could never afford one. A friend let me borrow a Old Metro Tech and I tried looking around the yard but all I could find was stuff practically on the surface. The ground was pretty bad where I lived. Then I heard of the local relic hunters association and I went to some of their meetings. These guys were showing off all the confederate buckles and buttons they had found and the best thing I’d ever found was a rusty nail. I tried to talk to some of the guys to find out how they found such good stuff but if you weren’t one of the in crowd who recently found a CS plate they didn’t want to bother with you. Their suggestion was to go to Governors, a relic shop and buy a bunch of relics and then come back and act like I found them. Then people might talk to me. Finally a nice guy volunteered a place I might try that was dug out but better than nothing . I went there and tried that metro tech but it wouldn’t work . I needed a good metal detector so I got a job that summer to get enough money to buy a metal detector. Whites seemed to be the choice then so after half the summer of working I saved $350 to buy a detector! I bought a new detector and figured I was good to go but then it hit me I still had no idea where to look. I went back to that place the guy told me of and actually found a bullet or two! I still wondered how these guys knew where to look so I went back to the relic club but as relic hunters are so often they were very tight lipped. It’s like you were trying to find gold they buried and you we’re trying to get it. They only wanted to talk to you if you were one of the good old boys who had found a load of stuff. I heard the phrase do your research more than once but research where? In What?? I had no idea where to look. I finally got a map of the defenses of Washington and at one of the forts it mentioned that Connecticut troops where stationed there. I though where can I find stuff about them and then my dad said let’s go to the library of congress and see if they had anything. He went there often. Well we went there and I found this regimental history of those troops and on one page it told of them shooting their big guns about a mile across the way at a big wooden target. It said the shells were flipping and sinking into the mud. I got the modern topo map of that area , drew a mile circle around the fort and looked for likely places for them to shoot at. I noticed there was a hill on the other side of the big highway that would make a good target and I took my new detector and went over there. There were houses all around the area but there was one little patch of woods between them so I put the detector to the ground and soon I get this big signal! Oh it must be a garbage can or something I thought but I dug anyway . I kept going down , deeper and deeper thinking it must be the mineralized soil and nothing’s really down there. I kept digging and then I hit something iron like. I said I must have hit a water pipe or something but then I saw that it was the nose of a 100 lb bolt! I couldn’t believe it! So far I’d only found a bullet or two and now this monster shell! Anyway I invited a friend over who was a relic hunter and after about a week we had dug over 30 shells out of that tiny spot! I knew right then that my destiny was shells!