Hello all…one of my contacts has relayed to me from the finder of an incredible two kilogram (grain of salt) nugget being found near “an obscure lake near Wanaka”. Keep your ears open for this one and If I can verify it properly will do so asap… if true this nugget would be worth over $150,000+ at today’s gold spot price etc and quite a novelty for the New Zealand Goldfields of our time.
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Would be awesome if true. Always wondered what was further upriver from the wakatipu fields. There’s quite a few volcanic spots around wanaka in the mountains so who knows. Prob never explored for gold much either.
Good on them if they did…but seeing us believing.
A few tributaries of Lake Hawea had gold, probably still do, & one was known for nuggety gold. I have had a look in a couple of them & never got a colour but there were signs of old workings & turned over ground. They wouldn’t have done that for nothing. 
JW 
It may be south of wanaka 
A book called "Wanaka Story’, by Irvine Roxburgh 1977(p106), has some interesting items…one regarding Californian Jim…late 1860s-70s, went off on a prospecting tour, two bushmen on a binge offered him passage to the head of the lake to Makarora where they drank a keg of rum…where the story gets wild…up a tributary of the Makarora Jim met a Scotsman who was virtually a chief of a tribe of Maori who grazed moa…not wishing to return to civilisation he gave Jim a bag of nuggets, twelve pound weight of them!
So I have done a quick papers past and came up with…https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/LWM18630919.2.14?items_per_page=10&page=4&query=Wanaka+moa+gold&snippet=true&sort_by=byDA&title=AHCOG%2CBH%2CCL%2CCROMARG%2CDUNST%2CESD%2CLCM%2CLCP%2CLWM%2CME%2CMIC%2CMTBM%2CNOT%2COAM%2CODT%2COW%2COSWCC%2CSOCR%2CST%2CTT%2CWSTAR
I personally have found the colour adhered to blue clay on bedrock at the Neck when the tide is out and in gravels of the Matukituki river at Mt Aspiring. I remember hearing the Timaru river has gold.
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Yes its true!..it was me that found it… an interesting story really… I was prospecting a little known tributary when I bumped into Kim Kardashian… she was all bent over stroking her rainbow unicorn…which was lame so I offered to help…(as you do)…turns out there was a rock stuck in the rainbow unicorns hoof so quick as a flash I pulled out my crieviousing tool and levered it out …turned out to be a big arse gold nugget… well Kim was so pleased …said that she would do anything I liked…“any thing”… so I asked her if she could classify my material for me down to quarter inch…but she left in a huff…mumbling something about returning to her BBC…weird I thought her show was on Bravo Channel…away on her rainbow unicorn which took off into the sky…but not before doing a wee poo…which I dried and ate straight away…as we all know unicorn poo is the best shit…so now you know…mystery solved!!..here’s the nugget to prove…(photo attached)
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Wasn’t wanaka called Pembroke in the Olden days?
Ha ha nice!
At that size its easy to determine the difference between a classy mineral and a common ‘ore. How i met my third wife…
However, if im desperate for that sort of porn i just go watch Maximov Ro channel on the tube😂
More than pleased its local though
Yes that is correct…So funny how the story calls it Wanaka. Maybe the lake was always called Lake Wanaka
"The present site of Wānaka was first surveyed in 1863, and settlement increased in Pembroke (the old name for Wānaka) during the 1870s because of timber milling in the Matukituki and Makarora Valleys and the use of Lake Wānaka for transport.
Wānaka is believed to be named from the word Wānaka which is a South Island form of wānanga, meaning sacred knowledge or a place of learning. Residents changed the named from Pembroke to Wānaka in 1940" History of Wanaka | Guides & Information | Wanaka Official Website
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Classic Mal.
Cheers Trev aka The Hatter
Looks like rocking horse poo. (petrified wood) 
Geez Mal, what are you on? 
You need to go find some of this
Result of doing this last weekend.
Good luck out there
JW
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That looks like a hole l nearly fell in after imbibing in too much cough medicine before l went walkies.
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You getting into dredging mate?! I thought you weren’t too keen on playing in the water. No gold is going to be safe down there now! 
Hi Gavin, Just having a play on a friends claim who has been decent enough to allow me that privilege. Nowhere near Queenstown area & I wouldn’t even really call it in Central Otago. I hadn’t used that dredge for probably 6 years. First weekend I was there I set it all up & the bloody motor wouldn’t go. 
Usually it is a two pull starter no matter how long it hasn’t run for. But not this time. I went to take the spark plug out to check it & didn’t have the socket extension. I improvised & ended up breaking the spark plug, so that was that.
Took the motor home & got the spark plug out, put in a new one & two pulls later away she purred.
Reminds we why I like detecting these days. I aren’t a fan of shifting heaps of rocks these days. In fact I wasn’t a fan 10 years back either. 
JW
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I must say I’m definitely on a roller coaster day to day whether I like dredging. When I’m not onto the gold I’m thinking “I might sale the claim” and “it’s a bit too much effort this dredging lark”, but then the next day I’ve moved onto a good spot and my mood is on a complete high and I’m loving dredging! 
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