Those little ones add up

There’s been a real buzz around the world lately with the discovery of a monster gold nugget in Victoria’s Golden Triangle; it never ceases to amaze me the amount of large nugget finds that keep coming out from the richest, but also the most detected dirt on the planet! I suppose this has a lot to do with the high gold price, which of course has been generating enough interest in the general population that there are more of us out there doing it, this then would assist in creating greater odds of this sort of thing happening. However I also feel it has a lot to do with the sophistication of the equipment we now have access to, namely in this case the GPX 5000.

5.5 kg monster gold nugget - Courtesy of Cordell Kent, The Mining Exchange Gold Shop, Ballarat

I’ve been at this game for the bulk of my adult life and if I went to my grave tomorrow (heaven forbid) I could honestly say I’ve had more than my fair share of the available detectable gold out there. However when you consider the amount of ground I’ve covered and the hours I’ve invested into this wonderful past time, you would think that I personally would have had the good fortune to get my coil over something that singularly massive, but alas to date it has eluded me.

So let's put this into perspective, I personally have found an amazing amount of gold! When you add it all up it is significant, especially at today's gold prices (Oh how I wish I still had it all). So what have I been doing to be able to collate such a respectable amount of gold? It's quite simple, I focus on what is attainable. The reality of the situation is there are millions of 5 gram sized nuggets sitting in mineralised soils all over the world and those nuggets add up, I’m not talking chicken feed numbers here folks, but real tangible amounts of gold weight that in the course of a prospecting season represent a sizeable income.

Last season I returned home with a reasonably good haul thanks to having a bit of success/luck in new areas, yet the largest was only 6 ounces (that’s tiny when compared to that huge 170+ ounce monster). I concentrated on the bread and butter nuggets and let the glory pieces look after themselves and in the overall scheme of things I did admirably well. My one secret is that I’m completely familiar with my GPX 5000 and know how to maximize its features in just about any environment, so much so that I can get near maximum performance on even sub gram gold thanks to my maxim which is ‘every little bit counts’. As an example one season some years ago I found well in excess of 150 ounces yet the largest nugget was only 4 ounces, the bulk of the gold I located was 10 grams and down and of those nuggets most were in the top 10 inches from the surface.

To me personally I look on every little nugget of gold I find as a miracle, I’m in awe of a piece of electronic wizardry that can tell me something is there even though I can’t see it. The biggest buzz of all is when I score a piece of gold in a totally new area; you just don’t know what the next target is going to be! I go detecting with my Minelab looking for ‘realistic gold’ because I’m safe in the knowledge that the technology under the hood of my detector will effortlessly inform me when I do finally manage to get my coil over that find of a lifetime. In the mean time I like to focus on what is more real world, finding those smaller nuggets in difficult environments, the odds are stacked so much more in my favour thanks to the potential of there being more of them available. Working the odds to cut down as much as possible on the luck factor has allowed me to accumulate pretty decent hauls over the years.

These odds are also in your favour too, there are plenty of those smaller nuggets still waiting to be found! The fun bit is along the way you can also have your tickets in the big lotto draw for that once in a lifetime monster nugget that could lay hidden in the goldfield gravels somewhere just waiting for you to swing your Minelab over it.

Jonathan Porter

The Outback Prospector
Aurum Australis