Easter Egg Hunt

That’s me and about 120 other metal detectorists at yesterday’s Metal Detecting New Zealand Aotearoa seeded hunt in Rotorua.

I left well before dawn to make the 3 1/2 hour drive. As it turned out I didn’t actually need quite that much time, but better safe than sorry. I woke up early anyway.

That’s the field of battle… a city park and beach on the big volcanic crater lake at the center of sulfurous Rotorua. Apparently this was a main swimming beach back in the day, but nowadays development has moved the town’s center of gravity, so this is kind of out in the ‘burbs.

After the speeches, thanking of the sponsors, and so on, we were away.

I called this a seeded hunt, because they had planted a bunch of stuff for us to find. Similar events in England routinely turn up Roman and medieval relics. But here we haven’t had metal for so long, so you’ve got to sweeten the pot. They gave away three new metal detectors, and some gold and silver coins, and various other cool treasures.

I won a hat, AND a t-shirt. But I also found a small silver coin, a 1940 sixpence to be precise, so that was cool.

Until this event I’d only ever met these people on Facebook, so it was cool to see them in real life (although my currently neurodivergent smile doesn’t probably make the best first impression). And it was really neat to see firsthand a couple of the people who always seem to find the good shit. Here we were, same field, same equipment, etc. And sure enough, I watched in amazement as some of the guys did what they do… find all the good prizes and a whole lot of original stuff too, while I was largely getting pull tabs. (In fairness to me, I was happy to dig the pull tabs… it didn’t seem appropriate to be too aggressively cherry picking only the obvious stuff. And the earring I found, although not real silver, still counts as a win on my internal scoreboard, and definitely sounded like a piece of “can slaw”, so patience can be rewarded. )

That’s my loot… the silver coin, the bullet, the rings (not real silver), and the little games token were seeded, and the rest was just in the ground. It puts into perspective something I’ve sort of suspected… there’s a lot of targets in the ground. Between us, I imagine we pulled 1,000 coins and several dozen pieces of jewelry out of an area maybe the size of two regular city blocks.

And we cleared a lot of trash. And we could have pulled at least three times more if that had been the point.

After about four hours of staring at the ground, including a break for sausages on the barbecue, it was time to go home. I was plenty tired at the end, but it was a really fun day.