Lockdown yarns to pass the time

Gidday chaps, I thought I’d start a page for people to post stories of their favourite / unexpected or otherwise entertaining gold hunting yarns. The idea is to provide some entertainment for these weeks of enforced abstinence from our passion…

I’d like to kick it off with a yarn which took place perhaps 8 years ago.

My brother and I drove from Blenheim over to the west coast to one of the popular fossicking areas. Neither of us had ever been to the fossicking area or the general area. Also we hadn’t found a huge quantity of gold at this point in our lives (not that I claim to have yet found a huge quantity).

So on arrival we set up camp and got our bearings a bit and wandered a few 100m upstream from the camping spot. At about 4pm I set my younger brother up with a sluice and said I’d go downstream for a bit of a detect. Soon I came to some bedrock and detected several bits of gold in obvious spots. Memory fails me but I think they were under half a gram each. So back up I went and got the bro and said let’s go check out the hot-spot together.

In short order we managed to detect 8g before dark! We said, hey camp must be just up this bank somewhere. Up we scrambled and we came out virtually at the tent. Camp was just 50m from our bonanza. The next day with the aid of digging and detecting etc we managed to get another half ounce for a total of 24g from our spot. Including some nice nuggety gold from 1-4g.

On the next day we went up a tributary for a couple of hours and pinged a further 4g. In total we found 28g in less than 48hrs mostly from public fossicking area and immediately next to the campsite. Memories don’t get much better than that for me. Excellent gold, great time spent with my brother and stopping in somewhere on the way home we turned the smaller gold straight into a nice wad of cash. Sorry no photos as they were on a laptop that crashed.

I look forward to reading of other people’s adventures!

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