The novice treasure hunter should be properly equipped in order to have the right kind of experience to keep them coming back. This is a list of the 10 best metal detectors for the beginner (i.e. under $300) factoring in price, quality,  reviews, and experience. Keep in mind these are all low end metal detectors which don’t come with a lot of bells and whistles. If you give them a chance and learn your machine well,  you will have plenty of success and more fun! So let’s start off with what we believe are the best detectors for a new treasure hunter and the average price you can find them for.

1) Fisher F2 ($215)

2) Tesoro Silver uMax ($240)

3) Garrett Ace 250 ($215)

4) Tesoro Compadre ($150)

5) Garrett Ace 150 ($155)

6) Teknetics Alpha 2000 ($200)

7) Whites Classic 4 ($290)

8) Bounty Hunter Tracker IV ($100)

9) Titan 1000 ($200)

10) Bounty Hunter Quicksilver ($90)

This list is in an order created by me and reflects only my personal opinion which could vary from those of others. The top 3 on this list are the most recommended beginner metal detectors in every forum and review I read. Good luck with your first detector!

The classic “Treasure Island” story by Robert Louis Stevenson has seen more filming than many actors in the business today. According to IMDB, there are at least 34 movies with that exact title, but who say’s there isn’t room for more? This story has come along way since the original cinematic inception in 1950 with Bobby Driscoll as Jim Hawkins and has seen big names such as Charlton Heston, Christian Bale, Orson Welles, and more.

Now the producer of the 2009 incarnation of “Sherlock Holmes”, Lionel Wigram, has entered the movie scene again in conjunction with Warner Brothers to create a new “Treasure Island” with a flair and edge that is becoming his style. He has competition from a studio called Ecosse so we will just have to wait and see who gets it first.

I personally am excited to see a new exciting version of this age old classic. If you haven’t read the book yet, I highly recommend it. You can find it on Amazon for $13.60 in hardcover the last time I checked.

This is a portion of an article posted written by Christopher Solomon of Smithsonian Magazine.

On the still, moonlit night of September 26, 1903, a tug urged the barge Harold out of what’s today the South Street Seaport and south past the Statue of Liberty. The Harold’s load that night was nearly 7,700 silver-and-lead bars. They were destined for the glowing Asarco smelters of Perth Amboy, New Jersey. The silver, and the smelters, belonged to the Guggenheim family, which had made its fortune in mining and smelting.

The cargo never arrived, at least in one batch. Somewhere in the Arthur Kill tidal strait the Harold tipped, sending most of the silver bars to the bottom. The barge’s deckhands—“dumbest skunks I ever had to do with,” the salvage company’s owner later told the New York Times—didn’t notice until docking at dawn. A secret salvage effort recovered about 85 percent of the bars, but that still left up to 1,400 “pigs” unfound. Today they could be worth $20 million.

One morning last fall, Ken Hayes set out to find himself some sunken treasure—that is, if no one got to Hayes, or to the treasure, first.