Hello all

I have always thought metal detecting sounded exciting!  I bought myself an inexpensive detector to start off.  A Bounty Hunter Discovery 2200 ( waterproof), I'm hoping to have some fun with it in the Cayman Islands next month.  We are staying near 7 mile beach. 
Any advice for a newcomer?

Thx lexxy

Do not expect much from your detector, so far the Bounty Hunters have not done well. Next time you want to buy a detector for a particular reason, call and speak to a dealer and ask for suggestions. I say this only because you are wasting time with a cheap detector. The one I use sells for $1500 and some bring ones on my organized trips costing as much as $3,000. If you can get your money back go for it and get a better brand and model.
I have hunted the Caymans more then and Caribbean 200+ times. In cayman we did well in Sting Ray City.

I bet you did not know, only the coil is water proof on that detector..if you get any water in control box it will destroy the detector. So be careful around water.

George is right about your detector only having waterproof search coils so you can dunk the coil in the water but if the control box gets wet then the detector will be toast.

Also your detector won't work well in salt water wetted sand or in the water itself (assuming you dunk the search coil and not the control box in the water). The reason being is that wet salt causes a target response in single frequency VLF detectors. Some of them are a little better than others but they are all unsuited to detecting in the wet sand or in salt water since they will false on the salt. You can use discrimination to block out the salt response but the problem with that is that gold and salt water wetted sand pretty much show up as the same target so if you block out the salt response you will block out gold (just about the best thing you can find at a beach) too.

The other problem with your machine is that it has fixed ground balance. In other words it is tuned at the factory to hunt in average soils you find in the US. The ground response from this type of soil is very different than you find at the beach. This is another reason your detector may false, or show targets where none exist. Higher end machines let you adjust the ground balance to the specific type of soil (or sand) you are detecting in.

Good salt water machines are all either multi-frequency or PI (pulse induction) type machines since single frequency VLF machines can't cope with the salt. Both of these types of machines are much more expensive than your Discovery 2200.

The one bit of good news is that you should be able to detect in the dry sand higher up on the beach where your machine should respond ok.