Sun, Sea & Finds!

The Perfect Holiday by: Steph

I had my bag packed! Weight was important! Only 15kg! Items of clothing and shoes had been discarded, but I had the most important item in my suitcase, My detector!

I had carefully wrapped it up between my clothes and was confident that it would arrive at my destination undamaged.

Now where was I heading you may ask? Well I had always enjoyed my foreign holidays to sunbathe and just chill out but this time my main objective was to hit those Spanish beaches and see what I could unearth.

Arriving at Alicante airport in the middle of the afternoon we decided the best course of action was to take a taxi to the villa.  After all we didn’t want to waste time travelling, we wanted to get on those beaches!  When we arrived we quickly unpacked and having read the local information supplied by the villa owner we set out to find the small beach which was apparently a 20 minute downhill walk.  20 minutes passed, 30 then 40.  Okay we must have taken the wrong route, time was getting on, we would have to abandon the search, we were both starting to get hungry anyway!  I love my food!  That evening we had a lovely meal in a restaurant and located the bus stop we would need to take us to the large beach in El Campello.  Our first full day would be there! 

At 7.15 we were on the beach.  We would have liked to have been there earlier, but there were no earlier buses.  We stepped onto the sand, turned on our detectors and within minutes…bleep, bleep, bleep.  We were picking up euros!  Yippee, what fun!  In the distance Doug spotted a fellow detectorist so we made our way over to him.  It turned out he was Spanish and Doug being able to speak fluent Spanish was able to gain information to on where it was good to detect.  It wasn’t long before the beaches began to get busy, but we were able to carry on detecting to the back of the beach still picking up euros and the odd Spanish coin.  My most exciting find of that first day, in fact the whole holiday, was that I found an 18 carat identity bracelet!  My first gold treasure.  I was very sad though to think someone had lost it!

Over the coming days we ventured further afield visiting many beaches along the coast.  We found we had to adjust the discrimination on our machines to avoid the mass of silver paper that was present in the sand, fearing then that we would miss other items.  But we had nothing to fear as we found one bracelet, two rings, three necklaces and three earrings.  Everyday without fail we picked up a handful of euros! 

We really did enjoy our detecting holiday.  We found holiday makers on the beach very friendly and many came up to talk to us.  The police patrolled the beaches regularly and never once did they approach us.  We met other detectorists, one of whom was a Russian lady and her son who came to Spain every year to detect. 

We do plan to return to Spain next year but this time we plan to get a villa in walking distance to a big beach so we can get out detecting just that bit earlier. Oh, and by the way, we did find that small beach and detect on it. If we walked a couple more minutes we would have found it!