When I look back on the latter part of trip with the benefit of hindsight’s 20-20 vision, I finally realise that what I was now noticing in Chris and Steve’s behaviour was mirrored closely to the freeing up of my own worries and concerns in trying to get them over gold each and every day. This phenomenon is a pretty common occurrence in the gold game, you at first manically try to find crumbs all day every day then towards the end of the trip tend to back off and relax, its then that things generally come into alignment. Chris and Steve now knew the drill; they had confidence in their detectors and felt more in tune with their surrounds which was then subsequently reflected in their gold finds.
I decided one morning to take the guys to ‘The Love Heart’ Patch which is where I filmed some of the material in our ‘Unwrapping the GPX 5000’ DVD. From the lofty heights of overconfidence I had up to this stage felt the pickings would be slim as the spot in question had really copped a hammering from me on previous visits. However Chris decided this was not going to be the case and showed me a lesson in humility by going low and slow investigating every little sound that his Fine Gold equipped GPX 5000 emitted. The gold started to flow within minutes of our arrival, with Chris grinning from ear to ear and me madly running about with the video camera trying to catch it all on SD card (the digital world no longer uses tape folks). It seemed the new approach to our overall endeavours was going to pay dividends at this late stage in the trip.
This patch was a very good location to basically VLF the GPX 5000, which is simple enough to do if the situation allows. First Fine Gold was selected which gives an amazing overall sensitivity to tiny nuggets, we also made sure Chris was using a small enough coil to get the sensitivity required to bring the smaller target responses right up to clearly audible levels, in this case an elliptical mono coil was also chosen for its sensitivity, but more importantly its overall surface area coverage relative to sensitivity giving us the best of both worlds.
The Gain was then increased well above the factory preset (FP) of 11, I tend to find elevating the Gain above FP mainly helps with the near to coil target responses generated by smaller shallower gold, on larger targets at depth an elevated Gain (too much above FP of 11) can actually decrease the response due to surface mineral noise swamping out the deeper target signals. Lastly we elevated the Volume of the speaker to bring the audio signals right up into his face. You can do tricks like this on known patches, especially a virgin patch such as the ‘Love Heart Patch’, because trash was virtually non-existent. The other thing I encouraged Chris to do was to speed the coil sweep up slightly and make the sweeps reasonably narrow, this method helps keep the coil at a constant consistent height without the tendency of lifting at either end of the swing when the sweeps are larger. Then all he had to do was listen out carefully for those faint repeatable responses that held in there, especially the ones at 90 degrees to the original sweep direction.
Not to be outdone Steve had typically stepped off into the unknown, towards areas where I’d not found anything of note in the past, using his 18-inch round mono coil and beloved Fine Gold Timings. Sure enough he was back in no time excitedly rapping on my shoulder to hurry and bring the camera so he could proudly show off what he’d discovered.
Why not take a look at the resultant video clip of the ‘Love Heart Patch” in the latest episode of ‘The West Australian Adventure’?
Jonathan Porter
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