Digging Secrets Exposed! by Peter Maas
Advice on privy digging techniques is plentiful these days. There are articles and bottle club programs on the subject. You can buy a booklet or video on how to get started. Most of them are quite good, but the authors seem unwilling to go beyond the rudimentary. They don't expose the advanced concepts that enable the best diggers to consistently find early, loaded privies. The reason they don't is fear of competition. After all, if everyone knew about and used these techniques, the supply of loaded privies could quickly disappear. This could be a mistake, but I'm going to expose some of these closely guarded secrets. To my knowledge, few of them have been published before. It would take years of digging and hundreds of pits to learn them on your own. If you follow these rules consistently, you can achieve results beyond your wildest expectations. At the risk of ostracizing myself from the digging fraternity, here goes:
- Make sure that you and your partner do not talk about "feeling lucky". Luck is a silly superstition that has no place in an activity that is based on planning, skilled use of the right techniques, and hard work. Besides, if you do, your dig will be jinxed.
- When you pack your tools, never bring a box for bottles because this can almost guarantee that it will come home empty.
- If you see a depression in the back corner of a lot, don't try probing it until you have probed the rest of the yard.
- If you pull a good bottle out of a test hole don't bother digging the privy. This will almost always be the only bottle in the pit.
- If the test hole makes it all the way to the bottom of the privy and there are ABSOLUTELY no shards or even seeds, dig the pit completely. This is one of the best indications that the privy is loaded.
- As you begin to dig, always make the opening as small as possible, even if it's a deep privy. A mistake beginners often make the hole large, right off the bat. The general rule is that your success is inversely proportional to the size of the opening.
- If you find bottles in the upper portion of the hole don't talk about what could be on the bottom because if you do, there won't be anything.
- When you expose part of a bottle keep your mouth shut. If you say "it looks blue" it will be aqua. If you say "it looks whole" it will be broken. If you say "it looks like a good one" it will be a bad one, and so on.
- When you get close to the trash layer, never probe! This is not because you might break something, but much worse: if you do, the bottle laden trash layer will simply disappear.
- Never allow yourself to fantasize about what you might find in the hole you are digging. Not verbalizing these thoughts is not enough. Rare bottles are skittish, and even the most fleeting thought of this type will scare them off.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Even expert diggers find it hard to avoid making some of these mistakes occasionally. However, if you can muster the self discipline to follow these rules consistently you will yourself in early, loaded privy's time after time. Just remember, it's planning, skill and hard work that get results - not luck.
