A short story about why sometimes a less experienced gold detectorist can strike the jackpot on well flogged ground!
I took my mate who has recently got into detecting to a spot near Queenstown which has been heavily detected for over 30 years. He’s using a Minelab GPX 4500 with the 14 by 9 Nuggetfinder Evo Coil, a favorite of mine though now I’m using a 7000 with Z Search. The plan was to take him to a number of spots where I’d found gold and see if we could squeeze out a few more.
We covered a few well hunted patches concentrating on areas adjacent to exposed bedrock but without success. Sat down for a break and a cuppa and then I left Jeremy to head along the terrace while I again hunted shallow ground near the bedrock. Still no luck so tracked down Jeremy who was in a area of random mixed broken schist gravel and dirt that had been piled up by earlier mining. He gave me a big and rattled his gold container. “Not a bad one” he said with a big grin and dropped a chunky 4.1 gram nugget into my palm!
It just goes to show you need to check them all. I’m sure that nugget had dozens of detectors over it and it was always dismissed it as trash.
Nice piece & that size is a rarity theses days. Especially on well flogged areas. Beginners “luck” is a real thing as they have no preconceived idea of where gold is more likely to be. So they just wave the coil randomly & in spots those of us that “know” better wouldn’t bother. But true to the saying, Gold Is Where You Find It, is so true. It can literally be anywhere when you are out among the gold fields.
Another thing is that NO one gets it all. The 4500 & in general the GP & GPX series of detectors have a huge range of coil selection & each coil has a different footprint & signature on gold of different size & depth into the ground. Even the structure of the gold can be missed by many coils but others see it.
Technology improvements help as well but these days that is mostly with small/tiny gold at better depth. An example there is the GPX 6000 but at $9k it is going to take a LOT of small gold to recoup your money, if that is the way you look at it. My first ounce with the 6000 was in over 300 pieces. Not to mention how many pockets full of shot gun pellets among that lot.
I generally dig every signal, well at least investigate it as you never really know until you see it. I am in the habit now of giving a couple of scrapes & if the signal has moved & it wasn’t a screamer of a signal then I put it down as a pellet & move on. I will wave my magnet over it & if it is iron it will leap up on to the magnet. If a .22 shell or bullet head I will see it & pick it up to get rid of it. Gold will generally live on down to a bit more depth than a pellet. I have found some hum dinger bits of gold that were just a surface scrape & moved. But they were screamer signals just like a .22 shell or lead bullet head & I always check those ones.
Any way. Nice find by your mate.
Thats awesome bro! Yeah its amazing the stuff that can still come out of even “Hunted out ground” (this obviously isn’t a 4 gram monster), but the first ever decent bit of gold I got with the metal detector was directly under the first bridge at Moonlight Creek (fossicking area west coast), the most obvious spot ever, crevices cleaned out all over the bedrock and holes everywhere around yet still pulled out a $20 screamer piece deep in this crevice.
Personally all the ground I detect is not super trashy so I will always dig everything, have had so many targets that are “Too loud to be true” pop out nuggets round the 1gram mark just close to the surface or targets that ring up like a bit of steel, flip it out only to find a nugget or picker. I once had a lead shotgun pellet flipped it out and was like bugger junk target, happened to scan back over and there was a similar sized piece of gold sitting almost directly where the shotgun pellet was as well!
Hopefully plenty more nuggets for you and your mate to come!
and rattled his gold container. “Not a bad one” he said with a big grin and dropped a chunky 4.1 gram nugget into my palm!
