Found 2 Interesting Coins Yesterday

I have a Bounty Hunter Land Star metal detector.  Damn, I have some geeky hobbies.  But anyway, give me a break, I really like finding old coins.  Well I haven't hunted since last fall and yesterday I randomly decided to give it a shot.  The problem with metal detecting (and treasure hunting in general) is that you need to find good hunting grounds.  You can't just go to any patch of grass and expect to find something good.

I have trouble finding good spots here in southwest CT.  Guys on treasure hunting forums always seem to live in Kentucky or Tennessee or something and they have all these civil war sites and homesteading sites to go search.  They constantly find buckets of silver dollars and crap like that.  For me, I have to settle for public parks and things like that.  I've had the best luck hunting along river (stream) banks in the woods... which makes sense to a certain degree.  People are attracted to water and you can imagine that somebody at some time in the past has stopped by the river to eat lunch or fish or whatever.  A riverbank is not what you'd call a rich hunting ground, but it's the best I can come up with that doesn't require extensive research and permission to access private property.

I spent about 1 hour hunting along a small portion of a riverbank in Darien yesterday and came up with 2 interesting coins and a bunch of face-value modern coins.  I was actually kind of surprised.  Here's what the good stuff was:

1895 Indian Head Penny

I love Indian Heads... they are beautiful coins.  Certainly the best penny ever issued by the U.S.  I'll tell you want, I HATE digging up a penny, rubbing it with my thumb and seeing the Lincoln Memorial shine through.  Such disappointment.


1923 Norwegian 5 ORE

This one really surprised me.  Because it came out of the ground so dirty I thought it might be a large colonial cent for a while.  This is the second large foreign coin I've found in parks in Darien.








The pictures above are not the actual coins I found... but they are really, really close!  However, pretty much every copper coin I pull out of the ground has significantly corroded on the surface.  I wish I could find a way to clean away the corrosion and staining and still come away with a nice looking coin.

I should also mention that I took a hit in order to dig these up.  I got bit by something on my ankle.  Some kind of bug.  I felt a shock of pain on the outside of my right ankle, looked down, saw something dark, and instantly swatted it away.  Afterwards I was like, damn, I wish I knew what that thing was because my ankle started to burn like fire around the bite.  I'm not sure what it was, but I was hoping over and over that it wasn't some kind of spider... some kind of Brown Recluse spider.  Ergh... that would suck.  Radioactive would be cool.. but Recluse?  No way.

My ankle seems fine today, so I'm guessing it was a bee or hornet or something that didn't have enough time to stick a stinger in me.