My wife and I have just returned from our 2012 prospecting trip. We started prospecting at Menzies. We both use Minelab GPX -4500 detectors and love them.
We picked up a few pieces up to 3 grams at Menzies and worked our way up to Linster, then Sandstone, picking up a few grams here and there. We then went to Cue and spent a week there. Tried a few of the local areas and our total at this stage was about 3.5 ounces.
One day we met the girls, who are two lovely ladies who have been going to Cue for about 40 years and had found a lot of gold in the early days. They mentioned that they found good gold at Webb's patch years ago and gold is still there. So I thought, why not give the place a try?
So we hooked up the caravan, drove out the 40 km and camped. After a week, we picked up around 1.5 ounces and decided we would leave and try somewhere else.
As we were driving back to Cue, we thought "why are we leaving Webb's patch when we are still getting gold?" So we filled up with water, fuel and food and returned. This time we camped on the main surfaced area.
The next day after lunch, I decided to detect an area that has been flogged to death. I started to detect and after a few minutes, I saw a slight depression in the ground. I waved the coil over it and got a very slight change in the threshold not a signal really, I thought it is probably ground noise as other people have thought so. But I scraped down an inch and waved the coil over again and the noise seemed slightly louder.
So I dug down a little more and thought "yes it is a signal!" It was very hard ground and as I dug down, the signal was getting louder and louder. When I got to about 14 inches the signal was very loud, but I was now into rock.
Using a large jack hammer, chisel and sledge hammer I chiselled at the rock for 1 hour, then 2 hours. At this stage the hole was 1 metre in diameter and 500 mm deep. People heard the banging looked at the hole and walked off thinking that I was mad for that much effort as it might not be gold.
My wife walked off not believing that it was gold. I chiselled at the rock for another hour. By this stage the detector was screaming! I kept on chiselling, trying to avoid hitting the object by chiselling around the perimeter of where the signal was coming from.
After a total of 4 hours, I saw a glint of yellow. I grabbed the nugget and it popped out of the hole in the rock. I called to my wife and said "come and look at this!"
After cleaning it up, it weighed just under 6 ounces. I didn't know how many people walked away from this nugget, but it must be plenty. We stayed a Webb's for another week then headed to Wiluna, Nullagine then Halls Creek.
We had a very successful trip as you can see from the photos.
Ray - QLD, Australia
