My Journey To Riches Starts With 600€ In Debt, And 8 Bottle Caps To Show For It

Welcome to the blog, and my long journey from debt to riches 🙂

I decided to start this blog because I miss the style of old, when people just went online to write about their lives, and bring each other along into our different worlds. Not a lot of blogs and websites out there like that anymore, so I hope you find mine interesting, and add it to your list to read.

After a few years of illness, career advancements, moving places, suddenly six years went on where I didn't own a metal detector - time sure flies. All this time, I have missed the feeling of just going out early or late, swinging a coil and digging some holes - and this time, I have lessons that I learned years ago, mistakes made and successes I've had - and they had six years to cumulate in my head, together with some new and upcoming events in my life - to the point where I felt ready to get back into it, and for real this time.

Thanks to my job, I get paid to travel more or less frequently, so it makes all the sense in the world to grab a second bag with a detector and a scoop, and spend the time I would otherwise be sitting in hotel rooms on whatever lakes, beaches, parks I might have available around where they send me. I will also be getting a sort-of-free company car sometime early next years, so I will be able to spend my weekends driving to whatever beach I find interesting, at no cost to me. That seems like the kind of lifehack that really makes a detecting hobby profitable, when I don't have to fear making less per year than I spend on gas.

Just in general, I feel ready to go back out there, detect and dig, and share my adventures with anyone who enjoys to watch, or read. I have set up my YouTube channel TrashureSeeker again, reviving it from the depth of insignificance, and hopefully, I will able to turn it around as well. My plan is to document the YouTube channel journey on this blog here, probably in its own category. I still have 6000 subscribers from when it was a pure magnet fishing channel, but it has been dormant for as long as I didn't go out detecting, so I assume most people no longer even remember subscribing to me, all those years ago. It's a fresh start with hopefully a slight push just for the number of subscribers I once had, I think that will make an interesting series of blog posts as well.

For now, however, all I have is a used Minelab X-Terra Elite, a very nice beach scoop (that has a neat little magnet to catch bottle caps!), and bought a little sniper coil that will allow me to differentiate between trash and treasure so much better.

A lot of initial setup has happened between me buying the detector and starting to write on this blog, and I have already been out detecting three times now, each time just with the goal of finding a single bottle cap, and familiarizing myself with detecting, digging, and developing an ear for the different tones again. So far, I have found two coins, 8 bottle caps, 3 pull tabs and several iron nails, undefinable aluminum blobs, and four holes where I couldn't find anything, I believe they were hallucinations of the big coil that the detector came with.

I have never liked the big coils, that was one of my main takeaways from my first stint in detecting. They just make it so much harder to guess if there is a signal at all in the ground, if it's promising, and sometimes, they find targets so deep that you end up digging a literal crater to the center of the earth. Small coils are a lot nicer to use, you get much clearer signals, much less distractions from mineralized soil, and the diameter is the same size as your beach scoop, so you end up digging far fewer times before you actually have the targets out.

I strongly believe that it is faster to detect with a smaller coil than a larger one, and honestly more fun. I bought it after my second hunt, and the third already confirmed that at least I won't be using the larger coil anytime soon. Every target that I dug was the same trash or treasure as you'd find with any coil, but I always knew exactly that I had something, and I only had to scoop twice a single time, because I hit the other ones on the first try. You always know that you have something under your coil, instead of guessing that you might have more than interference from the ground.

So, we are nearing the end of my first post, I hope that you enjoyed reading something real from a real human for a change - god knows the internet of today is filled with more trash than your average partying beach 🤪

I will put a little counter on this blog somewhere where I list all my earnings and expenses from detecting, YouTube and TikTok and this website. I think that will be fun to watch, how much stuff I dig up over the coming ten years.

Come along for the ride if you like, I have a spare seat in the back. Hop in, and let's go detecting!