Weekend Prospecting Trip on the South Island of New Zealand. The day was off to a cool start, I left home and at the time I think it was -5 degrees Celsius and very Icey on the road, black ice everywhere. I was in a thick fog when I left home to head to a friends place to pick him up but that cleared up about halfway to his house, it was about -2 when I got there I think and nowhere near as Icey up his way. We jumped in the car and off we went, the roads were much better up his way as it was nice and sunny. We went to a spot we have been to quite few times before and had success with my Gold Monster 1000, EQUINOX 800 and GPX 4500, finding lots of small nuggets, the EQUINOX has found my smallest nugget yet weighing in at 0.031 of a gram, amazing with its 11” coil finding such small gold. I’m only new to detecting so my success levels aren’t quite up to that of my friend who has done it for many years. I call the location the shotgun pellet place as there are zillions of them there. We started off detecting, my friend on his GPZ 7000 and me with my 4500. I'd found nothing by lunch time except junk and If I recall correctly my friend was up to his 3rd nugget. He just knows where to look better than I do as nuggets are few and far between here and also known to be very small. I use my Gold Monster 1000 as a pin pointer to make recovering the tiny bits of gold a lot easier. My friend came walking over and showed me his finds and we had some lunch. He suggested I go try detect some throw out piles from the old timers as it may increase my luck and showed me where they were and off we went detecting again. It was only about 20 minutes and I had my first hit, right next to a big hole someone else had dug to recover a nugget, probably my detecting buddy as it was a big hole like his pick makes I scored a 0.025 gram nugget. About 30 minutes of swinging later on top of another pile which was covered in soil and grass and not rocky like the last one I had another good target, It sounded promising and it seems junk in this area is uncommon as I'd had no junk digs since moving to it. I had to smash up the ground here to retrieve this one, it was in the shade and the ground was frozen solid, it actually made the recovery quite easy as the clumps of dirt were coming up as frozen blocks so I could sweep each chunk over the coil until it sounded off, then melted the target clump in my hand to get the gold out. I scored a 0.085 Gram nugget this time. I started swinging around further along this pile and there was a giant bit of schist and it was giving me a good signal, I spent about 20 minutes scraping the moss off and checking it all for the target and also breaking away the top layers of the schist trying to find where this signal was coming from, it had me stumped. I wasn't sure what to do, I was going to go ask my friend thinking possibly it's some sort of hot rock situation but I could see him off in the distance, too far away and I was unsure I'd find the spot again if I left it so I decided I'd try move the rock, maybe the target is under it. It was in frozen ground and had suctioned itself down, it was also FAR too heavy to lift, I used my pick to dig around it a bit and lever it up, this took a good half an hour and I was exhausted, I managed to move it a tiny bit which relieved the suction, it also had me rolling down the side the of pile as I took a tumble when the rock finally gave way. Now that the suction was gone I was able to lever it enough that I eventually slid it down the side of the pile. I eagerly checked the area where it was and bingo, the target sound was still there. The rock would have been about 20 cm thick and then the nugget was down another 5 cm or so in the soil under the rock. My Biggest of the day 0.299 of a gram. It amazes me just how small the gold is the GPX 4500 can find and the depths it can get it at. My friend ended up getting quite a few more nuggets than me that day with his GPZ 7000, five if I recall correctly. Day two was a very different day, it warmed up a lot, Westerly winds blew off Australia bringing over some warm air, I woke up and it was 9 degrees outside and raining. I thought uh oh, detecting in the rain but had a hunch it would clear up as I headed closer to the gold fields area. I made a b-line straight back to the spot I was detecting where I found my three the previous day and my friend headed to the shallow bedrock nearby with his GPZ. I scanned around the area for quite some time and found nothing other than shotgun pellets, bullet shells and odd bits of scrap metal, looks like we cleaned the area out. But there is one more thing I must mention, I found a RING, it was no longer than 30 minutes after we arrived, in a tailings pile about 20cm deep. It was in an area surrounded by shotgun shells so I guess nobody bothered to dig such a loud booming signal in the past in this heavily detected area. The reason I dug it is I read that morning about the guy who found a 1.7 ounce Nevada nugget in a heavily detected area also. It was obviously a signal people didn't bother digging too thinking it was junk. It's Silver and Ivory. It’s most likely an old Chinese prospectors ring lost in a tailings pile, this area was heavily mined by the Chinese in the late 1800’s Its 24 Grams, the sucker is heavy! My friend got 7 nuggets that day using his GPZ but I’m sure he would have preferred to find the Old miners ring. Another good day prospecting 🙂
Simon - Southland, New Zealand
