Have you ever met any old timer coin hunters?
I bet they had some amazing finds (probably shallow).
Wonder what the machines were like back in the day?
Guess they were small (coil) and expensive.
I saw a lady detecting a beach back in the 80’s with a tiny machine. That was my first and only metal detecting experience until I got my own machine.
In the 1970s the Australian Post and Pix news magazines featured gold nugget finds with metal detectors - the two big ones most featured were Garrett Deepseekers and Whites 6000 so my parents bought one of each - back then they had to be bought from a place in Florida in the US of A. I got the Garrett and off coin hunting. I did over the Waimate race course and the old Timaru A & P Showground about 1981 - both these places were gold mines to the extent that if it was not silver I threw it away! They were by far the best two places I ever detected.
My grand mothers back yard was also good with a lot of pre 1922 silvers as it had been a WWI returned soldiers convalescing home. Noted half crowns and florins - no gold though
Interesting to note that New Zealands largest lost treasure is TEN THOUSAND pounds in gold coins. It is not recorded in any history books but was a well kept family secret. I have sometimes wondered about going to look for it. All coins will be a minimum of 155 years old.
That’s great. Shame a lot of the old Race tracks have been redeveloped.
I’ve got one to go after some time, from the 1940’s. It’s on private land, so hopefully no one else has been there yet.
[quote=lammerlaw]Interesting to note that New Zealands largest lost treasure is TEN
THOUSAND pounds in gold coins. It is not recorded in any history books
but was a well kept family secret. I have sometimes wondered about going
to look for it. All coins will be a minimum of 155 years old.[/quote]
You can’t tell me that - now I’m dying inside.
I did think about going after Barringtons treasure, someone did in recent times, but they wussed it a bit. Besides the Kea’s wouldn’t likely got to it 
I dont know that one but sounds interesting. The ten thousand pound one was my great grandfathers - Jimmy the Needle - I wrote an article about him for Treasurenet - a great US site you might like.
gday gold pandemic.i remember golng into a second hand shop in 1985 i went in to buy a air riffle saw one on the rack bsa air sporter 700 ft per sec,wow!! had to have 15 quid later it was mine,then leaving the shop saw a second hand c scope again 15 quid later i was taking it home.just two knobs on lt very little disc on it would only pick coins up to about 4 inches but i was hooked,never asked for permissions them just went in the local paddocks loads of iron odd shallow colns nothing at all valuable,but the thought of finding something great never left me,what a fantastic pass time.the moral of the story is the old timers never had the machines to find anything…
The Garrett Deepseeker was a discriminating detector and yes it was good - very good - I still have it along with a Goldbug and a Minelab Xtreme and I still favour the big Garrett for coins to this day but it is too heavy now for me - come to think of it it was then as well! The Minelab is also too heavy for me to cart from hell to Hallelujah so my son has it
That’s an awesome story Lammerlaw.
Why not get a crew of detectorists together that you trust and go on a short mission - if only for the fun of it?
Not a silly idea and had thought of looking for it but never got around to it - Jimmy the Needle was a whaler. A woman made up a fiction story based on him which featured over several articles in the Oddity (ODT or Otago Daily Times) and which was published recently but no story has ever mentioned the gold. His Daughter Hema told her Daughter Minnie Paiki who was my grandmother and she in turn told me.
The family always were pretty secretive about it but none of us have gone looking for it - I really think it would need a detector that covered large swathes of ground to 2 metres or so in depth due to the changes in the countryside.
I do know that Dad’s cousin always looked along the banks of the river in case ithad eroded out when ever she and her husband were there fishing.