Everything You Need To Get Started In Magnet Fishing

In addition to treasure hunting, magnet fishing has an environmental aspect-it helps to clean up our waterways.

- By Ben Demchak

IT WAS ALWAYS A TREAT when my mother rented movies. I never expected one of them to change my life. In the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark, archaeologist and adventurer Indiana Jones, played by Harrison Ford, is recruited to recover the long-lost Ark, along the way digging up relics and piecing together the mysteries surrounding them. It was all the inspiration I needed. At that moment I knew what I was going to do for a living, and I didn't need a magic sword or a way to travel the galaxy to do it. All I had to do was learn a craft.

And so, I did. I've been a registered professional archaeologist, with an undergraduate degree in anthropology from California University of Pennsylvania and a graduate degree in North American history from Norwich University in Vermont, for over 17 years, and I'm as addicted now as I was then to what it's all about artifact hunting. I love recovering objects, whether it's digging deep into the earth or sweeping the surface using a metal detector. I've excavated burial mounds and pre-contact villages and metal-detected battlefields. Sometimes you get lucky, but sometimes you can spend hours prepping and days scavenging only to return home with nothing.

So when I saw a YouTube video of a guy using magnets to retrieve submerged objects from bodies of water, I was intrigued. And though none of his haul was the type of stuff I was used to finding during a land excavation-he reeled in a gun this different style of treasure hunting, called magnet fishing, almost guarantees you won't go home empty-handed. Even though his find ended up having no historical significance, what I found even more compelling was not knowing the gun's backstory: Who owned it? Why was it tossed into the water? Was it used to commit a crime? It was like a modern-day mystery that needed to be solved.