This year has been different on the gold fields, nearly everyone is doing it tough, the Tourist Prospectors that is. The Professionals keep to themselves so you never hear what they are getting, though some are considering giving up prospecting as the larger and easier gold has gone. This may be rightly so, as it seemed like yesterday I was swinging my first new FT 1600 and my first nugget weighing 3grams. Today I am using Minelab's latest and greatest GPX 5000.
I have tended to use aftermarket coils in the 14” to 16” range. On the first few days I found it hard to get onto anything promising, just getting the straggler nugget, one here and maybe one there. Sitting next to the fire one night I reflected on what I had been finding, virtually nothing. The few nuggets I had found were ultra-small and at best, 50mm deep.
Having my morning cuppa it was time to get serious and try and work out why I wasn’t getting my share of GOLD, I ditched the 14” round mono and put on Minelab's 11” round mono, why are they in inches and not gone to metric? Anyway, I headed to where I got the last 2 nuggets, I did a hard reset on the detector, then chose, Fine Gold Settings, Gain at 10, Stabilizer set to 5, the rest of the settings in FP except the tone and then tweaking the detector as I went. I had worked the hard bony area reasonably carefully with the 14” coil looking to make a patch happen and it wasn’t going to be. Well that was yesterdays thought.
The fun was about to start, first nugget in a minute, 10mins then another, small and shallow, 4 maybe 5 to the gram fast easy gold. I ended the day with 6 grams and that’s a nice daily weight. Just don’t count how many. When I hit the 31.1 gram mark I decided to count, 95 pieces to the ounce. What’s amazing is, an ounce is still an ounce, small or large, and over 400 pieces kept the fun happening for days. Prospecting for the tourists should be fun and not a labour of love, go back to basics.
Gold is still gold, does the size really matter?
Thank you Minelab for your determination and innovations, always improving on the latest and greatest detector released.
Paul Olsen - Qld, Australia
