The Wife and I had been visiting a particular spot on and off for a while, never finding much, but every trip I would find at least a little sub gram nugget or two. The gold appeared to be in a narrow area and each time I tried the spot I slowly made a map of the finds which in turn started to resemble a little trail. There wasn’t a lot of junk targets in this area, so most times when I got a quiet signal on my GPX5000 it was gold, and I was having a lot of fun.
This particular day started out like most others in this beautiful part of the world with the sound of the cool running water in the nearby stream and the many frogs chirping their little songs and the Wife trying to splash me by throwing rocks into the waterhole besides where I was detecting. My concentration was brought back to earth upon hearing a very soft signal, I could have missed it but it was a repeatable sound so I removed the leaf litter and tried it again, this time the signal was clear but on the quiet side so I commenced digging. The first several centimetres were easy digging, but that changed when I hit what appeared to be almost cemented wash. At this point the signal got louder and my heart rate got faster, I knew it was going to be a decent nugget.
After what felt like an eternity, I had dug down over 50cm and the 5000 was overloading so I had to resort to the Pin Pointer to locate the target, slowly I dug around the target then suddenly I saw gold! Around the size of the tip of my finger so I tried to pick it up but it wouldn’t budge. Carefully I scraped more of the hard wash away, revealing even more gold and it was still fixed in place, now I thought I was dreaming. Finally I pulled it out, and showed the wife who was just as surprised as I was.
The nugget weighed in at 251 grams ( 8.1 Ounces) which cleaned up to exactly 8 Ounces once acid had removed the little bit of ironstone, I was surprised that the nugget was solid as initially I thought the Iron stone ran through it in places.
Cheers
Dean – NSW, Australia
