I thought that maybe you all might be interested in how my prospecting mate and I hit upon the “Crystal Gold” patch. We had been detecting an area that we found a few decent nuggets in, including a very nice pendant quality nugget that we christened the “dog t#rd” because of its long and thin shape, and my mate (he found it) wouldn’t let me near it for a long while because I kept saying it would disappear into my collection. This particular day we were detecting the same area and the only nugget was a 15 grammer that I scored from the gully that ran through this spot below where “doggy” was found. I suggested that we should go and look at a spot that I found plotted on a map, as it gathered my interest because I’d never seen it listed on any other map I’d ever looked at for this area.
I already had it entered in my GPS so we set off the 10 or so kilometres to get there. On arrival at the closest point we could access with the vehicle I took off on foot to go the last few hundred metres, passing by an old timers digging where they’d obviously dug on a reef and hand dollied the results going by the 3 different piles of throw aways beside the hole. The spot on the GPS I looked for was another 200 metres and I passed by some gullies that had very interesting and mineralised large quartz floaters in them. Arriving at the indicated spot I set off in a different direction to get to the vehicle so I had another look at the general vicinity.
Harnessing up the detector I told my buddy that I was going to detect the area I motioned with my hand, but on the way I saw another interesting site that deserved a wave over. A few metres into it I got a good hit and looking down spied a 3 gram sunbaker. Calling RD over to see the nugget before I picked it up, I had a good feeling. He never got to do much detecting that day because the gold came thick and fast with him being the backhoe, and I had many bits up to just over an ounce in a few square metres of ground, away from which later on gave him an 11 ounce beauty from 2 feet deep. We scored around 5 ounces of gold that day.
The next weekend we arrived at the same spot and I set off to detect the same area. RD moved further up the slope and a while later he signalled to me that he had a bit. A minute later he signalled again for a second. A few minutes later a third, so I went to investigate. The next signal he detected was close by and as he went to set the detector down, it screamed yet again so he had to shift it. Both targets were gold!!
We detected as close as we could get to each other and I left him to what appeared to be the centre of the patch. To cut the story short he got a record 36 bits and I found 11 for the day, the largest piece uncovered being just on 2 ounces. This spot produced several more bits over the next few attempts, almost all of it being crystalline in structure with interesting shapes. I dug one nugget around 10 grams that I’d dismissed twice before as a ground noise beside a tree (the ground was warm enough to work) and as we detected the patch spread out, although the crystalline gold was found in one tight spot.
The best bits were the 11 ounce, followed by a 9.5 ounce bit that looked as though it had just fallen from a small thin leader, a 6.5 ounce solid beauty and many smaller bits for a total of around 2kg. All of the crystal bits except the 2 ounce piece are in our hands to this day as they are irreplaceable.
It goes to show that research pays off if you are willing to venture away from the common spots.
Happy hunting and may most of your targets be golden.
Peter Cragg (aka Qld Sandy)
Gold City Detecting - Minelab Authorised Dealer
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