Economy of motion is something I catch myself saying. I think the term of Economy of recovery is better. What I’m talking about is recover speed. Often when I go with friends to the field, I’ll keep one eye on my search coil and the other on them, so I can see if they found something. I love the feeling when a friend or I find something and we share that experience.

I often find myself getting a signal, bend or kneel down to recover the target. While I’m doing that I see my friend do the same. I quickly recover the target and replace the plug of earth and move on. I get another signal, dig that and so on. But I notice my friend is still in the same original hole that I saw him 5 targets back. It was almost a common ratio of 5:1. I could dig five targets to his one. This is a significant development. That means I’m finding 5 times the junk as him, as well as 5 times the keepers (potentially).

Economy of recovery is broken down into two simple parts. Pinpointing and digging technique. If you’re off by a couple of inches in your pinpoint that will slow you down considerably. You’ll have to expand your hole after your initial plug, possibly causing unneeded damage to the ground and the target. There is nothing worse than gouging a piece of silver. Digging technique is a tough thing to learn for coinshooting since there are several methods used to dig a nice plug. I personally like to do square plugs vs. circle plugs. I feel like I can return the plug in the same position as it was extracted. Also, when I dig circle plugs, I notice I do the “cone” plug. When I do square, I take out a larger volume of earth in a cube configuration which gets me to the target easier. I also use a dirt collection cloth, where I dump soil onto the cloth instead of the grass. This separates the dirt from the hole so I can quickly scan the extracted soil and the hole. When the item has been recovered, you can use the cloth as a make shift funnel to fill the hole with your extracted dirt.

Next time you’re out in the field see if you can improve your recovery time. The more targets you dig, the more opportunity you’ll have in finding quality targets.