Treasure Hunter

By Vince Basehart

May 2 -- Dave is playing hooky.

On most Tuesday afternoons such as this one he is usually sitting behind a desk, not standing ankle deep in sand on Santa Monica Beach, wielding a Fisher F75 metal detector.

He works a high stress, high-powered executive job up in the Valley and lives in Santa Monica. And his name is not really Dave.

"I don't tell them where I'm going," he says, regarding those afternoons he ducks out to pursue his hobby. "I just let them assume I'm out at a meeting."

Dave is prowling a swath of beach just up from where wet sand meets dry. His metal detector is basically a black box with a hand grip and an elbow rest, connected by a pole to a disc resembling a dinner plate.

The disc is the working end of the gizmo, which measures the magnetic field of metals, and uses it to send a tone back to the box and into the headphones Dave wears over his ears.

Dave waves the disc back and forth just inches above the sand in a slow, Tai Chi-like rhythm. Some metals won't even register. Others will warble slightly. Metals such as iron will register with a vengeance, creating a sound like a chord from an electric piano.

In his other hand Dave carries the kind of large plastic scoop that you find in hotel ice machines. When he gets a hit on the device he uses the scoop to dig for treasure.

The problem for any treasure hunter is all of the false readings you can get, leading to fruitless digs for rusting junk.

"You get to know good hits from bad ones just by their tonality," he explains. "If you didn't, you'd be digging every two feet."

He is tall, sun-tanned and too young looking for a man in his early-50s with a son in college. In his faded shorts, bare feet, long-sleeved t-shirt, and baseball cap he looks like he should be hanging with Jimmy Buffett rather than CEOs.

Dave stops in mid-sentence. He's got a hit. He crouches down and with the ice scoop, carves out a small hole in the beach six inches deep and pours the sand into his hand. He strains the sand through his fingers and shows me a 2007 Thomas Jefferson nickel.

Dave shrugs and pockets his find. "That's the kind of stuff you find, stuff that falls out of people's pockets."

He may dismiss it, but the thrill of the hit, the dig and the little five cent treasure has left him grinning.

"I've always been an electronics geek," he admits. "I was always fooling around with radios when I was a kid, and was interested in how things work. My dad would get so mad when I tore radios apart."

He's been detecting off and on for a good twenty years.

I mention that metal detecting reminds me of pictures I've seen of soldiers during the Vietnam War using very similar instruments to locate land mines.

"That's exactly where this technology came from, although now it's far better. If it wasn't for the military, we probably wouldn't have this kind of thing generally."

So what does he find?

"I actually find a lot more trash than I do anything. But I have found all sorts of stuff." Dave gazes upwards while taking a mental inventory. "I've got a whole bunch of rings, tons of coins, some watches, a few nice lighters, other jewelry. Nothing really valuable though.

"The best time to detect the beach is after weekends or a major holiday. The more people, the more people there are to lose things so you can find them. The day after Labor Day is huge."

Alas, there are no doubloons or pirate treasure left on our beach, but even trash with magnetic fields can be of interest.

"You find all sorts of junk. I've found nuts and bolts, spark plugs, old batteries, an Oregon license plate, fishing stuff, even a kid’s toy gyroscope."