am probably better known for my coin and relic hunting, having had some fairly reasonable success over the years but I just hadn’t been able to master the gold side of things. After a couple of attempts, firstly swinging a GPX 4000 in Victoria a few times and then a few more attempts with the GPX 5000, I was over it and pretty much ready to throw in the towel.
Well it seems like all the planets have aligned just perfectly and it is an absolute God send for me with the release of the Minelab GPZ 7000. My first reaction to seeing the 7000 was “WOW, what a beast” and for me it was great to see a very similar design to the CTX 3030. After being crushed by my first attempts in gold and being on the brink of defeat, I suddenly had hope again that maybe this would be the turning point. It wasn’t long before I had arranged a trip across the border to see what this beast was capable of.
First day out I started off with the SDC 2300 just to warm up, probably more to the truth I was feeling a bit reluctant having found the GPX series a bit frustrating for me and I kept wondering if the GPZ 7000 was going to be too confusing. After my so called warm up with the SDC 2300 my fear had subsided, so I grabbed the GPZ 7000 fired it up and went to work on some old thrashed out diggings. I was surprised at how simple it was to work through the menus, it was basically turn on the machine, Noise Cancel, set to High Yield, ground Difficult, adjusted my settings to suit my preferences (Volume, Threshold etc.) and start swinging. I had to play around with the Sensitivity, lowering it to 5 as it was quickly apparent that this detector really had some punch to it.
I started finding targets straight away, some very small lead from a mixture of depths and also some larger targets from up to 2 feet deep which was surprising as this area has been gone over many times. Well unfortunately the day only brought forth trash for me but my mate I was detecting with had managed a couple of small pieces with his GPZ 7000. Second day out I was feeling a lot more confident and it wasn’t long before I pulled my first piece of gold with the GPZ 7000, a nice little sub-gram nugget encrusted in ironstone.
Given that these diggings have also been done over really well I did manage another couple of sub-gram pieces amongst about another 15 – 20 bits of lead, ferrous etc. which all had the potential to be gold. Well it wasn’t a lot but I had finally found gold and some confidence thanks to the latest gold detector from Minelab.
While driving back home and no less than 10 hours after finding my first pieces of gold, I was already planning my next trip to Victoria, but that’s another story.
I guess gold fever is a genuine ailment after all!
Comments
To make comments you must be logged in, please note comments will not display immediately due to moderation