Blog

The following day the rain came in sideways but I had to get out there to try find at least one treasure, and I had to test my new boots. For the last ten years I have been on my second pair of M77 boots from the Norwegian Army, but lately they had been taking in water faster than a torpedoed convoy ship. The last time I wore them on a wet day my feet were soaked within the first ten minutes. My new footwear was a pair of Haix boots with the fancy name Black Eagle Athletic

Three meters away from the Blendax pit I struck upon another little garbage dump. This one was filled with broken glass from bottles and windows. Tons of it. But also a few other relics. It had the third rifle cleaning kit of the day, another gas mask canister, a very interesting bottle I have never seen before, a half rotted K98 ammo pouch and a pair of goggles. And a to me very interesting find.

Last summer we had localized a slope full of garbage. An old landfill with German stuff from the large camp on the bottom and gradually more modern stuff up until the early nineties had been dumped on the top. A slope one can read like a history book. It was our plan to open up a section of this slope, but as we were walking around with the detectors warming up on some single signals Baard discovered a large burn site full of relics just below the vegetation.

I had begun walking back to the base camp to collect my stuff and go home when I dug a good signal. It was a fragment of a Nahkampfspange! The needle was twisted, so force had been used to break it in parts. I spent the next hour trawling the spot, piling any finds onto a rock so as to not dig them twice, but the rest of the badge was nowhere to be found.

Most of this week the weather was wet and nasty and I had to work a bit, so the only summery day I spent searching in the gebirgsjäger camp. I usually dig on most of the beeps given by the metal detector, and have found many treasures checking bad signals, it is an exhausting strategy though. Having found so many erkennungsmarken on my last searches I decided to go exclusively after good ones on this trip.

A little bit later the detector presented me with another strong and good signal. I cut open a piece of the ground and made eyecontact with half of an Erkennunksmarke. That was a surprise! It was dirty and looked a bit deteriorated so I couldn`t read it other than that I could spell `Geb`. I stuck the pinpointer into the ground and

Signals everywhere. Crate parts, creamtubes and food tins seemed to litter the place, but the best find I had before my allotted time for detecting was up I spotted with my eyes even before the detector came near it. A metal pipe stuck out from the ground near the edge of the marsh. I grabbed it and pulled it straight out. A rifle!

Another hour went by with nothing to show for before the Fisher again found a good signal. This time it was something under a line of three medium sized birchtrees, so I got to use the saw for a while getting through the horizontal fence made of roots. Here were the best finds of the day. First I pulled out a Finnish knife, the Pukko. It was in great condition, still sharp even! Toghether with it were a few German coins, a small medical bottle and a Göffel with a name engra

The first signal the Fisher F5 picked up was a helmet! It was even visible as part of the back rim was sticking out of the ground by several inches. I got it out of the ground and shook out the soil that had accumulated inside it through the decades. In the helmet-shaped mass of soil and roots I could see parts of the leather and aluminum liner, but most of that had rotted away, only the chin strap was still intact.

I had to scoop out a ten centimeter layer of gravel, and on a meters depth I found what I belived was the corner of a crate. I knew it would take at least another hour of work freeing the box, so I took a short break for lunch and refreshed my energy. The box was about a meter long, and when I finally managed to wriggle it loose and get it to the surface I felt it was something inside it.

On wednesday morning it was nice and sunny so I got ready to go searching, so very early I drove off towards a piece of land that had come up during research. A small Gebirgsjäger unit had supposedly camped up there for several months and I wanted to see if they had left anything behind. I found the place marked on the map and went in between the trees letting the metal detector lead the way.

Today it is Winter Solstice and the Yuletide is upon us again. Here in the house of HobbyHistorica it will be a calm and cozy celebration. I have a couple of weeks more or less off work, and am planning to use some of these days to catch up on some diorama making since the nice and snowy holiday weather seems to have been replaced with a grey sky, warm and rainy days, so I guess I can forget about any skiing.

A signal from the detector had me opening up the vegetation and soil, and I found a small fire pit. It had mostly rubbish of course, but I picked out a couple of Finnish coins, a 10 pfennig coin, a candle holder, a brass ring, a nail file and a compass, so not a bad start.

I got the box to the surface and it was of the type that had held optical sights for machineguns. And it was heavy. I gently used my blade to open it, hoping the sight would have survived, coz the box was pretty rusted and had probably been cooked in the fire.

When we got to the large square pit, I swept the detector around the edge of a corner of it, and got a good signal. It was coins. A relatively large spill with 19 coins. Mostly German 5- and 10 pfennigs, but with a few Finnish coins mixed in. None in very good condition.

Around lunchtime yesterday I was digging up the top of a Notek lamp from a rockfilled dumping pit. In the small pile of relics I had already dug up were also a 7.5 cm shell casing and the headlight from a bicycle. I had arrived to the site some twenty minutes before Jimmy, and taken the detector around for a warm up.

We went to the far end of the pile and began digging in underneath the metal mountain. Almost instantly Jimmy began pulling out parts from MG34s and 42s. The parts were all in very good condition. I pulled on a rod sticking out from the jumble and it was a perfectly preserved wehrmacht grounding rod.

Between the collapsed rocks that had made up the foundation of the building the Fisher picked up on a aluminum signal. I had to flip a rock over and found a piece of trench-art under it!! It was one part of a cigarett case, and it had a name engraved with cyrillic letters.

As I was searching alongside a pathway going back towards my car the Nokta gave off an iffy signal below a crooked tree. Usually I wouldn`t dig on such a weak and uncertain signal, but I still had time and I hadn`t really found anything interesting, so I decided to try something. My car was only fifty meters away so I ran over and grabbed the Fisher to sweep that across.

A few days before we had made a longer trek to another camp, and there we actually spotted a moose when we were leaving the site. Not more than 40-50 meter from the forest road something caught my attention, and as I stared in between the trees I suddenly saw it clearly. A large moose.