Search in the sea, this time Sardinia!!

Last July I spent my holiday in Calabria in the south of Italy, and I must say I was quite successful. Five gold rings was my record from the sea, which will be hard to beat (article here Searching in the sea or going to Italy for gold).

This year, the choice fell on Italy again, namely the northeastern part of Sardinia, the area around the port city of Olbia and the surrounding area within 40min driving distance.

The car trip to Sardinia includes a ferry crossing, where you need to book accommodation (via booking perfectly fine) and the ferry well in advance, I booked everything in January, and given that Sardinia sails in about 8h, the ferry and cabin. Livorno is about 1200 km away, so a shower and bed was quite handy. After disembarking at the port of Golfo Aranci I could start admiring the beauty of Sardinia, and especially peeking at the beaches where I could relax in peace with my detector in the water 😊.

Right after dinner I went to test if I had forgotten how to search in the sea. I set the manta up classically to search in sea water, sensitivity 18-20 depending on how the soundings were, recovery rate 4, basic discrimination pattern, upper 7, lower 1, unison and allmetal. I've been running this setup all holiday, I couldn't think of anything better, so if you have an idea how to improve it, I'd be happy to learn something new 😊.

Hotel beach in the dark and the water was lit only by the light from the Manta, by the way an incredible helper of night searches, and I about 20min without signal, completely washed out. I told myself I had imagined it differently, but finally the first diggable signal came, ID 16, it went into the iron a bit, after digging on the third try the signal disappeared from the hole, and there was only iron humming, nothing in the sieve. I swung next to it and there was a completely clean 16, just next to the hole. I picked up the presumed signal, then shone my detector into the screen. "Holy shit" were the first words I uttered into the dark 😊, first signal and first gold, a cool 18k snake shaped ring, when it's actually a wire twisted into a ring shape, even though it was over 3 grams id was pretty low. A dream start, unfortunately the next few days I was just dabbling.

The next days I functioned in a mode of in the water at 4am in the morning at one of the nearby beaches (10min drive), swimming with the family in the afternoon and searching amongst the people and in the evening try to clean the hotel beach. Unfortunately I was only carrying trinkets, schmucks and euros. During the day, searching among people was totally cool, Italians just looked, sometimes asked, sometimes joked when one Italian took off his massive ring and acted like he just found it 😊. Almost everyone did a manual check to make sure they had all the jewellery on their hands, feet and neck and occasionally someone would come up saying they had lost something and would I find it. Even an Italian woman festooned with gold reported to me that she lost a massive gold bracelet and ring in one moment... she even showed me where, but unfortunately I couldn't find it. There was nothing where I could find it and I didn't dig deep ☹. At each beach the lifeguards were scattered 150m apart, no problem and they didn't care. Only on one beach, where there were a lot of people and a narrow strip where you could swim, a lifeguard came up to me and said that snorkeling was only allowed in the morning and evening, which I accepted. I went back there the next morning and pulled out my second gold ring, this time ID 45 and a large 4g wedding band, again in 18k gold 😊. It was chest deep, and probably wasn't in there long, stuck in the sieve on the first try. I didn't find this second gold ring until the fifth day of my holiday.

The next few days were again about trying the nearby beaches, one morning I went to a beach I hadn't been to before for a dayI couldn't go any further, so I wanted to cut through the middle, where it was a bit muddy, but Formentor is 4x4, I thought to myself. Unfortunately for me, halfway through the car park I was starting to lose speed, the car was raking like a bastard, so I pulled over, threw it in reverse and with my arse in gear I dug back out and drove around the whole thing in disgrace 😊 The car was covered in mud and sand, and it wasn't until dawn that I looked where I'd actually driven into. The "parking lot" in the middle was rutted as people got stuck in there and dragged them out, so I was glad to get out of there and get a look. I had to visit the wapka in Olbia later that day because the car looked crazy, and the mud, as it dried in the sun, wouldn't come off at all. The parking lot I looked at the map afterwards was normally a pond of water, where the edges were dry and the middle was waterlogged 😊.

We ended up on the huge La Cinta beach in the resort of San Teodoro, (about 40min drive) where I looked three times. Beach over 3km long, thousands of people, 50m water depth from the shore to knee deep and then another 50m you could easily look neck deep in the water, huge space. I gave it a go twice between people and once in the morning from 3:30. I found most of the rings but only silver and steel ones and one small gold earring with ID 5 that but I caught it with my hand at the last minute, otherwise I would have probably farted on the signal because it couldn't be fished out. The fine sand in the sieve was disappearing incredibly fast. Here I was walking a big 15" spool, and even though the area was big and I had a signal every 10 minutes, I found a lot of stuff, but also a lot of junk, mostly jerkbaits that go quietly from ID 15 to ID 35 depending on size, shape and age☹.

Well I won't stretch it, no more gold fell by the end of our stay, we said goodbye to the hotel on the morning of the 10th day and since our ferry didn't leave until 11:45pm, we used the time to make another trip. After 40 minutes we reached Palau and from there we took the ferry to the La Maddalena archipelago. Here our plan was to find two beaches and swim and maybe get some sun. The very first attempt to get to the beach failed due to the amount of people on the little beaches, so we turned around and looked for another one. Luckily, it took 10mins to cross from one side of the island to the other and we found one free beach on the north side of the island. Here it was fine, except it was windy and there were quite a few waves and the sand in the water seemed quite coarse to rocky. Eventually I took the plunge and struggled with the waves for a good three hours. The pebbles and coarse sand turned out to be a win in the end, as things didn't sink that deep and after pulling out a completely black AG ring with an ID of about 95, I got the impression that no one had probably been looking here for a long time. And I was right, a little while after the ag ring I got a signal with ID 14, a nice little ball on the chart, of course I thought, this will be the torso of the ripper again, but kto my surprise there was a tiny three-coloured gold ring in the sieve, again 18k, weighing about 1.77g. Beautiful, it was 3 metres from the bank on the first retrieve. I return to the blanket and hammer out my wife's finds, like a magical donkey hammering out ducats. I was praised, given a drink and immediately sent to the other part of the beach as time flies and the ferry back to Sardinia won't wait, so val val 😊. So I ventured to the other part as well, which was closely guarded by a lifeguard. Luckily he just watched me and didn't say anything, and I could search in peace. After a couple of tears another tear signal came with ID 22, it ended up being a black steelhead so I was happy, three rings in one day is great. I headed for shore thinking I would search another area 2-3m from shore, after a bit of searching ID 17 and I just watched another gold ring glisten in the screen. I deftly pocketed it as the lifeguard kept scanning the area and I thought great, unreal, I can go home now. I scanned another 4m2 area and another signal of some mess, and then again an interesting ID 39, when after flushing the sieve another big snob peeked out at me. By then I was slowly going to my knees and internally screaming at the top of my lungs, then calmed down hid the 3g little darling in my pouch and headed out like a blanket 😊. The joy was unreal and I equalled my Calabria score from last year in a minute twelve so to speak.

The journey home went fine, only at customs before entering the ferry we were singled out for inspection and I had to take one bag out of my suitcase which the police officer identified and they x-rayed it. Luckily I didn't have anything illegal in there and the rod and detector in the suitcase she saw left her cold, ugh. Watch out for sand and stones from Sardinia, they are not allowed to be exported under a 70k fine... good thing I didn't know that at the time 😊

The overall score is:

5x AU ring, 1x AU earrings, 5x AG ring, 3x OCEL ring, 60 euros, a few AG earrings, an OCEL chain and cross (ID 4) and some schmucks, including a Cartier bracelet 😊. I'm also attaching a photo of the junk I pulled out so you can see the disparity to the interesting finds.

A short video that hopefully gives a bit of an idea of the atmosphere is here. Where to next time? Italy or France again, I don't know yet 😊