Around a month ago the wife and I were invited to a birthday party at an old mate’s place in the NSW central west, so we thought that would give us a good chance to do a bit of gold fossicking as our spots up here on the Mid North Coast usually only give fine gold. So we packed my GPX 5000 and the Wife’s Eureka Gold and made the trip down and hit some of the well-known fossicking areas. The first thing that I noticed, other than the 1000s of flies was many unfilled holes from recent detectorists, and in one area where the holes had been roughly refilled, the person had reburied the junk! The Wife and I always fill our holes and take away any trash that we dig up, this not only is good for the public’s perception of our hobby, but also helps fellow fossickers when they detect the site next.
Karma is a strange thing, the above mentioned site gave up several small nuggets in between and to the side of these rubbish filled detector holes… mmm, don’t know how they could have missed them.
We moved onto another area that had many dig marks, this time I couldn’t even find a junk target. I was just about to call it a day when I waved the 5000 over a real loud “raspy” sounding target, in amongst reasonably fresh diggings, but even though it sounded like junk, I dig everything. I scraped the top and expected that the target would be a large rusty piece of steel, but no, the signal was still in the now hard ground. Digging down another 10 to 12 cm and the ground was very hard and when I saw the compacted river wash my heart rate started to elevate. Na, it couldn’t be! The target was now setting of my PRO-FIND 25 Pinpointer and it was still buried under the almost rock hard wash. Finally after digging for what seemed an eternity, I felt something heavy in my scoop, then caught a glimpse of shiny yellow, It couldn’t be… Yep, there it was and it turned out to be a 3.7 Ounce nugget around 30cm deep. It was on its own and I would guess that many had walked over it and left it thinking it was Junk.
Moral to the story – Dig everything, and backfill your holes taking any rubbish with you.
Catch you’s out there
Take Care,
Dean - Australia
