Hope everyone has had a great summer with golden Pans! I spent the summer in central Otago on the gold, met up with dozens of local prospectors and gold miners from all over the country and the world in my travels which was pretty cool. Got to visit many claims and claim owners none of which I can mention names or locations but got to hang out with some amazing people. Had a big support crew, followers of Mal’s Gold Adventures which was great, even got myself on TV once or twice..and me dog. Met up with legends like JW and lammerlaw as well as made a heap of new friends!
The gold prospecting community in NZ is very strong and growing all the time, there is a gold rush on and many people are cashing in and doing well which is great to see!
Big shout out to Charles at DredgeNZ who helped me out more than once this season, a guy with a big heart who unfairly copes a heap of shit from the gold mining community at times. Also had a great helping hand from Justin at the gold shop and Mandy at Raw in Arrowtown. One issue that became very apparent this summer is that a lot of hobby prospector are in desperate need of more places to go for free in NZ ,With such a vibrant community I can’t help wondering if it might be worth trying to make something happen if we all banded together on a few issues! Watch this space!
In November I was summoned to NZPAM headquarters for a “friendly chat” as one of NZ’s gold prospecting social media personalities they wanted to remind me of the importance of promoting good prospecting practice in my videos as they were receiving an increased number of complaints of claim jumping from claim owners etc.To which I replied that ideally having more public fossicking areas would be a great solution to this problem. Surprisingly NZPAMS were fairly receptive to the idea and I was surprized to learn that historically quite a bit of work had already been done on this topic but successive governments had put the brakes on the idea. I will start a new topic thread this week about the process needed so will leave it at that. A big thank you to everyone I met this summer, hope to do it again in the near future .. Photo is of one of the nuggets I found this season 2.6 grammer! cheers Mal
