Gold has consistently been found in the claimed waterways and significant signs of past gold mining activities are present. Ruffe Creek, in particular, boasts an extensive collection of water races and moss-covered tailings lining its banks and hillsides.
Access is easily available from the highway to reach both the Shenandoah River and the lower portion of Ruffe Creek.
My dredging efforts have been concentrated in the more accessible Shenandoah River part of the claim. While I have not yet ventured into Ruffe Creek with the dredge, I’ve successfully detected and sniped for gold in that area during exploration.
A section of the Maruia River also makes up part of the claim where the waterways combine.
The work programme for the permit is as follows:
(a) Unless otherwise approved in writing by the chief executive, the mining of gold bearing gravels for the recovery of gold using hand tools and one or more suction dredges, where the suction dredge has a combined engine rating of no higher than 10 horse power; and
Lol, not quite. Need a cash bump to help buy a property. I think I’ve hardly scratched the surface in that claim being just a weekend dredger when time and weather allowed.
Once I figured out that you need to keep moving if not seeing gold, rather than persevere with a spot, I tended to average about 1 gram / hour by my rough calculations.
For anyone that buys the claim I’ll happily provide a tour of easy access spots, the spots I’ve dredged and the spots I feel are worth dredging next based on experience in there.
Regarding a 6 inch dredge in there… some parts are extremely suitable and I’d imagine it would do very well, but there’s also sections I’d imagine you’d struggle getting a dredge of that size into.
Good on you Gavin. So what will you do if you sell the claim? Dredging isn’t easy & these rivers have been mined before & the old timers didn’t do too bad a job & didn’t often leave much. The costs & red tape to dredge these days just keeps getting tougher & the rewards less often. As a hobby, a bit of fun, but to make a living, not so much with the costs of living today.
To be clear, in case I’ve undersold it a bit, I have had some very good days where I’ve hit a particularly good spot. The gram / hour is my usual expectations when getting in there with a dredge and properly chasing good ground.
I’ll still be out there looking for colour… detecting and hitting the odd claim I have permission to play on. I’ll hopefully pop in on you next time I’m down Queenstown way
To be fair thats with a 4 inch dredge and I still think those numbers a good. Theres not many claims out there that you can do a 1 gram per hour with a 4inch If you put in a 5 inch you’d be more than doubling than figure therefore your ROI assuming $100 per gram. would be 200 hours with a 6 inch your less than 100 hours .
Hi Leyton, I’ve got several Pete’s numbers in my contacts list, but you’re best reaching out to him via a PM if he’s on the forum. If you PM me and tell me which Pete you’re after I can forward your number on to him just in case he doesn’t like people sharing his number directly.
