What is your favourite piece of gold prospecting gear?
Let’s see it…here is a photo of the gear I packed for my last trip.
3 Likes
you are missing the kitchen sink
I was just taking a photo of my kit .caz said I wasn’t allowed to post it . I was using a wide angle lens as well .
2 Likes
@Mal I can see a cable and a few pulleys in the mix. Did you have a winch too? And if not, what were you using them for? Curiosity piqued!
Yep …for tirfor winch which is already down south.
1 Like
Maybe you couldnt find it. Try a wide angled magnifying glass 
JW 
1 Like
Is that a wee speck of gold in the pain that you are teasing us with
1 Like
My goodness that sure is civilization. Looks good though and very practical. I still have my gold dredges but none of the members here would look at them twice as they all date back to the 1960s and were amongst the very first suction dredges in NZ.
1 Like
Did nz pioneer suction dredges ?id love see some pics of what you used , back when I was a tadpole
Good spoting GoldenEel…but no …I think it’s a pistachio shell…how’d that get there…lol!
I think my uncle and a couple of others got the idea from some Californian gold dredging magazines. I think the first one may have been made by a guy called Ron Holdaway and the engine may have been an old motorbike engine. One of my goldmining friends from away back trolls this site (I see ya reading this!) and he will know. In any case my uncle and his goldmining partner also got into it. Shortly after they took on a third partner, a fellow called Jack White. My uncle was mining in Moke Creek every January - he did day trips from Arrowtown and averaged 18 ounces from the Moke every fortnight every holiday. He got 8 ounces in an afternoon under the Arrow River Bridge - that was about 1976. When my uncle died after he collapsed with me gold mining in May 1978 his partner old Jack White asked if he could be my partner as he didnt like my uncles other partner (I never liked him either) and so Old Jack became my partner. Old Jack White really knew where the gold was and took my Uncle and the other wanker to Shag Valley, Waipori River above the lake and Deep Stream. For my uncle 6 ounce days were not unusual.
When they used dredges they were under water ones though we did have a surface one. All home made.
When I look them out I will take photos of the last three that are still intact. I wrote one off in the Arrow about 1975 when I drove under the influence from Arrowtown to Macetown at 1.00 in the morning but thats another story.
You guys will laugh at them but they helped recover more gold than most people ever dream of.
As for my partner old Jack White if you have a copy of the book ‘Skippers Triumph and Tragedy’ By Danny Knudson then theres a photo of old Jack on Page 49 and a photograph of his father wearing a heater on P160.
Before he died old Jack gave me some old mining relics he had including quartz samples used to raise capital for the OPQ at Waipori and the golden Progress at Oturehua and the name plate from a gold stamper at Waipori and the Wilfley Concentrator at Bald Hill Flat.
Photos of the old underwater gold dredges we used - when I get around to it…
4 Likes
Cool history Lammerlaw!..“6 ounce days were not usual”…aaarrrhhh!!!
This is not correct as I gave a lot of gold away this day and this is merely what I had left at the end of the day. It is not my best day but the only day I have a photo of. If I didnt average an ounce a day it wasnt worth it - those days LONG gone. I think I ended up for about six hours work over two days with over a pound of gold from this crevice. In 1995 someone showed me a bottle I had given them with gold in - I couldnt believe what I had given her! When I gave it to her there were six bottles so five other people got them as well. I used to give away a lot. I also used to swap it for things I liked.
4 Likes
wow ive got along way to go my best day is just under 1/6th of your best day, but I wont stop trying is a lot of fun and hard work , I bet the gear available today you would have done even better, I had home made dredges for years looking back lots of failed projects , still waiting to make my fortune out of gold, I always said im not giving up my day job tho and bam I have no day job , so as soon as Jacinda gives me the nod im away , its not really about making money for me as I havnt yet, but just the being outdoors and stress free life style . It gives me some good inspiration when I hear of 6 ounce days , im sure my claims capable , just need some luck , I wonder what the biggest haul in a single days dredging in nz is . look forward to some pics
No we would not have done better with todays gear. I watch with interest as the fellows debate which are the best mats etc for their sluice boxes. We used coir matting from door mats and so on and never lost any gold. We werent after small stuff though and rarely saw colours. mostly all nuggets. I generally used the dredge just to get to the bottom then picked up the gold with Snifters which is the correct name for the gold suckers. My daughter holding my best nugget.
8 Likes
Unreal which part of Waipori did yha find that?
Did you suck it up or spot it under a big rock?
Yes same here
Would love to see the old rusty dredges
1 Like
The gold nugget was in water so shallow that you would be cross eyed with a face mask and you could barely get your hand under a glass bottom box…2 to 3 inches of water and 1 to 2 inches of gravel and two feet away what might have been an old wheelbarrow wheel or the wheel to turn off a valve or something.
1 Like
my earliest trip dredging was in around 1985 . I had a second hand book shop in Timaru and used to get this dude coming in looking for gold books. got talking to him (as you do) about gold and ended up down macetown dredging, and round danseys pass.
one time we split petrol on the polystyrene floats , so that was the end of dredging for the day
best days work was on my claim in the lewis pass of 1.2oz for the day
this is the full trips gold 3 days of it
6 Likes