Gary Drayton

Growing up in Grimsby, Gary spent many years as a bottle digger in the UK, digging old Victorian trash pits and "mud hopping" along the river banks in search of old bottles, clay pipes, doll heads, and marbles. Some of the bottles he found dated back to the early 1600s and the clay pipes from the 1500s. His oldest bottle find was a Roman perfume bottle dating from the Roman occupation! It was bottle digging that eventually led to his interest in metal detecting; every year Gary would find more and more coins while digging for bottles. When Gary then moved across the pond to South Florida he decided one day to take his metal detector to the beach and on his first day out he dug up a Spanish Silver Piece of Eight. Then a few months later he found a 1715 Spanish Fleet Gold and Emerald Ring. His "outside the box" approach to metal detecting has lead Gary to explore various search techniques and different sites, always aided by his site reading and metal detecting technique to find treasure. Since then has found hundreds of Gold Rings, Jewelry of all types, Coins, Silver, Rolex's, Bronze Ship Spikes, War Artifacts and Spanish Treasure! Gary is a relentless beach hunter who has even been complimented by Famous Late Great 1715 Spanish Fleet Salvager Bob Weller for having the 3 P's - Patience, Persistence and Preservance. Gary is fortunate enough to make a living doing something he loves, writing beach and water hunting related books and giving private treasure hunting lessons. His Spanish treasure finds even caught the eye of Hollywood producers which led to several appearances on TV shows before finally joining the cast of "The Curse of Oak Island", the top rated treasure hunting show in the US, as the resident metal detecting expert. Gary utilizes a range of Minelab detectors. His first Minelab metal detector was the Excalibur, a metal detector he still uses today. Gary states that "As any long time Minelab user will tell you, the only way to beat a Minelab is by using another Minelab so I always have other specialist tools in the old tool shed". Searching for Spanish treasure on the beach Gary prefers the awesome, deep detection power of the GPX 5000 and large Commander search coils. While for traveling on metal detecting vacations he grabs the Equinox 800 and for the majority of tourist beach jewelry hunts he can't go past his CTX 3030. Gary's most memorable find is the magnificent 300 year old Emerald Treasure Ring worth a cool $500,000, a true find of a lifetime! While the thrill of the hunt and that awesome moment as you recover something that was lost for hundreds of years from your scoop, has kept Gary hooked on detecting. Gary has detailed his unique beach and water hunting methods and search techniques in his range of books so that all detectorists can learn from his many years of experience. He also has his own blog and YouTube channel, in addition to being featured in the History channel series The Curse of Oak Island.