Hunting in New Zealand ( Lots of NZ Photos in this thread)

Here are some little babys I picked up last time I went to New Zealand for a holiday.
They were found between and to the left of the 2 rocks in 2nd image

    YAHOO they look great!! tons a au 2 u 2-John   

 Thanks John.  I have found some beaut nuggets around this spot. I was born on this property but it has changed hands a few times since. I know where there is a reef that my old uncle got heaps of gold, and when us kids were young we went down in the hole. He was so mad he took his dynamite up there and blew it in.!!! It is still there and maybe one day I will get a go at it. Meantime I will just wander around and pick up the nuggies. I still have some of the rich reef gold he left when he died. He always said that the reef continued across the gully so when I get my Golden King I will be looking for it. As I live in Australia now I don't get over there very often.

The Cat

Ya just gotta love a country that convinces people (tourists), that its fun to roll down hill in a puddle of water inside a big plastic bubble, ( they call it a Zorb).  And where they apparently have taught gold nuggets to jump up onto the coil of any passing metal detector. 


F.

 Well Mr Functional (or is it dysfunctional?) lol At least it is my detector they are jumping on to......

The Cat

Hi guys, Yep there is some nice gold to be found in NZ.

Check out this 5ozer



2ozer



Or this cabinet of NZ collectable nuggies housed in the Gold Shop in Arrowtown



Some nice little pickers found with a 2" gravity dredge sucking out a mountain creek hole.



Sluice boxing





And it is that time of the year agian with summer just around the corner

Happy goldin

Kiwi JW

 Apparently the gold around arrowtown can be about 98% pure.  Nice nuggets. You are obviously from around that area JW?

G'day Wildcat, Sorry mate ment to make mention of your nice gold. Well done.
I am from the Coromandel area but lookin at movin down to Central as the Coro gold aint a patch on the central stuff. How come you have jumped the ditch? Foot in both camps aye I run a GP 3000 looking for gold but pretty much stick to the water, dredgin & sluicin & crevicing & all that. I know central pretty well especially the QT, Arrowtown areas, Macetown, Skippers, Bannockburn, Carrick, Nevise, Naseby, Bendigo, Kyeburn, Cadrona etc The list goes on aye........Beautiful Country. Godzone. The worlds best kept secret aye You do much in Oz?

Good luck & happy golding.

Kiwi JW

Hey Wildcat, Check the pics I put up on the Whites/Goldbug thread. Bit of Arrow gold & some rough hokey pokey Coromandel dentrital that hasnt travelled very far from its source. But do you think I can bloody find it. LOL

Take care out there & may there be glint of yellow at the point of yer pick

JW

  DAMN RIGHTEOUSLY GOOD LOOKN' GOLD GENTS    tons a au 2 u 2 -John

 Hey JW and all. I came to Oz in '76. Got fed up with Invercargill weather. I was born in Ranfurly and lived young years at Poolburn, Omakau. I agree, it is some of the best country anywhere. Just too cold for me in winter. If I ever went back it would be to Alexandra / Clyde area. My brother used to have a small portable dredge in the Manuherikia near Omakau near the Dan O'Çonnell bridge.  Nice and shallow, quite a few rock bars here and there. I am a detector man but would have a go at a dredge if I was in the right locale. I have lived in Western Australia, Victoria and have been in Queensland most of the time. Found some good bits in all those places.
The Cat

Well Mr Functional (or is it dysfunctional?) lol At least it is my detector they are jumping on to......

The Cat

    <-- Dis Funtional

  I know you have most of the good nuggets down there and enough of a season to seriously hunt for them. I'm happy when I cover costs. But, I'd be happier if I could just find a reliable source for vegemite here in western Canada. I met an aussie gal once and she got me addicted to it.

F.

Well (Dis) Functional.....  I prefer Marmite..  (Beef extract instead of vege extract) Looks the same but just tastes better to me.
My mate and I went out for a hunt today and found 20 cents between us.....grrrrrr

Well (Dis) Functional.....  I prefer Marmite..  (Beef extract instead of vege extract) Looks the same but just tastes better to me.
My mate and I went out for a hunt today and found 20 cents between us.....grrrrrr

I was going to try Marmite once, but then I saw that it was the UK version with veggies in it. I'd heard that the NZ version was better, but I've yet to find any in the stores I've looked in for it.

There's twenty current cents, then there's twenty historic cents. The later is preferable. Maybe stick to nugget shooting? Twenty nuggets. Now I like that sound of that, no matter how old the nuggets are.

My season for gold is at its end here, with a snow levels reaching down to within 150 feet of the valley bottom, but I'll spend the winter preparing for next year. Just bought myself a used oxygen acetylene welding and cutting outfit, with supplies for working with regular steel, stainless steel, aluminum, and cast iron, enough to last me the next year. From this point on, the winter months will be spent living vicariously through the lives of other gold panner's and nugget shooter's.

K.

Inspiring Photos and story guys, you're living the dream.    Blessed be.

Hi guys, Here is a bit of Kiwi Gold country scenery.












Hydrolic sluiced area 5000ft above sea level. All that white is little water worn quartz pebbles





A river diversion tunnel



Happy golding

Kiwi JW

And a bit more



Heading up the Arrow River sluice boxing




The result of a couple of hours





Gold mining ghost town hotel ruins. Horse stables in the back ground


Bit of snow in the back ground


Miners hut


Kiwi JW

But wait....there is more

Another old miners hut & inside


Hydrolic sluicing monitor in action


Hydrolic sluiced area


Tailings race from the hydrolic sluiced area above


Water wheel powered 10 head stamper battery


Another stamper & berdan set up (ruins of)


Hand stacked tailings


Another stamper


More hand stacked tailings


A different kind of "digger" in the creek


Happy golding

KiwiJW

    Come on now--where is Frodo???thanx much for the great pix and I'd give any of my X-wives to run that moniter too!!! thanx much John   

Wow, great pics guys. Let me pack my dredge and leave no forwarding add'y

Oh dear Ankh.... VB  Victorian Bitter = Australia.....

That 'track hoe'  or excavator as I call it looks like one that was owned by a chap that wanted to be a silent partner with me and my brother.  He would supply the machine and we would work the spot while he would be the silent partner and just rake in the shares.  As soon as I saw the machine I shuddered and ran.

The Cat

it sure would be cool to goto New Zealand to see my friend Trev Alty. and maybe get some NZ gold to boot!

My memories of NZ beer are,  Speights 3 star,  DB (Dominion Bitter) and due to the fact I have just had a couple of Woodstocks, I can't remember any more.

NZ is certainly a beautiful country, but when you live there you take it for granted.  I enjoy my trips back there occasionally and last time took my new wife who loved it.  She is an Aussie country girl. (way to go)
I must renew my passport in case I decide to go for another trip....

The Cat

Kiwi JW,are you the chap from Jack Langs old Forum?........Dave.

G'day Dave, Yes I am the one & the same JW from Jack Langs old forum. Bloody good sit this one.
Cricky Ankh...... where the hell did you get the notion that Kiwi's, New Zealanders, were church going none drinkers. I reckon we are probably the biggest drinkers per head of population than any other country on this planet. Fancy relating VB to a kiwi beer, & fosters & goanna's. Yep Speights, Pride of the south for over 120 years. My beer of choice. There is of course Waikato, Lion red, Tui, Montieths a west coast beer that goes back to the gold rush days, DB (Dominion Brewries) Mac's ale etc etc I could go on & on & on......But I wont

Here are a few more pics. This one is an old school of mines building that is slowly rotting away



Mt Cook New Zealands highest mountain. This was taken in the middle of summer



A Glacier on the West Coast of the south island



An old grave stone in the Skippers Cemetry. Struck a chord with me as I was the same age as the father & my son the same age as the son who was killed at the time I took this photo



Lake Tekapo, south island


The Remakables Range, & Lake Wakatipu Queenstown. NZ


Detecting an old miners hut



The result



Berdans in the bush



A quartz reef running through a creek & up the bank. It has had samples cut out with a petrol powered cutting blade by the looks of it



That will do for now.

JW


 

WOW!  Those are some nice pics! NZ looks like a wonderful place to visit.  Thanks for posting guys!

Hey Ankh.  We aren't allowed to roast Goannas or Snakes, in fact it is getting to the stage we can't do anything... lol
Not that it dosen't happen!
We have a 40 acre bush property and always have to be on guard as the goannas used to try to get our chooks and ducks and eggs.
I lost a Indian Runner duck to a snake. Needless to say, even though it was too late I retrieved my duck.
We also have Guinea Fowl and dogs that chase the Goannas and give us warning they are around.
We have several deer in the area and a panther has been living around here too. Haven't seen him for a while now but my daughter has seen it near her place about 30 klms away. I believe there are a few about.

The Cat

G'day Wildcat, Thats a very interesting yarn about your old uncle & his hard rock mine. You say "mad" uncle. Was that "madness" due to him using mercury to retort his gold from the crushed rock?? Do you, or can you put up some pics of the gold samples that he left you?? Be good to see.
 That area wouldnt be in the Blacks/Ophir locality would it. I have been to the old Golden Progress mine site which still has the poppet head structure with cage still all intact. The only poppet head left over a shaft in NZ. I will have to rat out some pics of it. I wonder if it is on the same run of reef as it isnt too far from Ophir.  Check this site out. Click also on the other areas in the left margin for other localities in Central Otago gold country. Enjoy    http://www.centralotagonz.com/Centr...s-Mine_IDL=24_IDT=294_ID=1543_.html

JW 

Hi JW  First of all my old Uncle wasn't mad. Just cranky because he considered the hole dangerous and we went down in it. He didn't think we would find it but we spent lots of time shooting rabbits in the hills and came across it.  I will post some pics later today but my camera is not good at macro shots.

Hi there Ankh, Hey no problem putting up these pics & yarns. Glad you enjoy them. We are a friendly bunch down under & only too happy to share golding matters & experiances. This is a very good site & covers a wide range of all sorts of every thing. Very good to see the goss on the different detectors & peoples opinions. I am very tempted to get either a gold bug 2 or a GMT to complement my minelab gp 3000 to find the small gold at the surface. Although my 3000 does a pretty good job of finding small stuff as well.
Wildcat, Thanks for the pics of your uncles specimens. Very nice. Similar to some species I found up the Carrick Range at Quatzville just above Bannochburn when I was down there end of last year. Mine didnt have the amount of gold that your bigger piece is showing though. You may be interested to see this map & have a bit of a nosey at this site in general.
http://www.ophirgold.co.nz/map-aug07-big.jpg
When was the last time you were there & did you know of this company?
I will see if I can find some more pics from here in NZ to share with you guys.

Happy golding

JW

Jw  when you go thru XXX, there is a gravel road that branches off to the left before you go up XXX Hill and goes along to the river. If you drive along there you can see heaps of workings on your right that go up into the hills.  Workings are in most of the gullys. What a lot of folk dont know is that the farm land on the left of here used to be covered with shallow prospect holes too. I am certain there would be nuggets in there.  As you go up XXX Hill there is cultivated land over a gully on your right about 2klm up. I have picked up a few nuggets in there and also, over the road, there are more workings in the gullys where I have picked up quite a few nuggets as well. A lot of this property was owned by XXX. I have also in the past visually specked the odd rock with gold lying on the surface behind XXX. There are very extensive workings in there in places. (and a few deep unprotected holes if you are driving around)  North east of the little Stone house used to be all shallow workings but it has been flattened and I never found much in there.
Hope this gives you some clues. As for when I was there last, probably around 2 1/2 years ago now.  BTW I used a GB2 and found lots of little nuggets in the workings, but I believe the 3000 I had seemed just as sensitive. If you already have a 3000 I wouldn't waste money on the GB2 as I really don't think you will gain any advantage.
**EDITED TO STOP IDIOTS TRAMPLING EVERYWHERE WITHOUT ASKING PERMISSION**

The Cat

great pics from every one.

G'day Wildcat and JW,
   Great pics and info guys. I must say you're exceedingly generous with your info, and as my better half and I are going to spend a couple of weeks around QT over Xmas, we might go on over and try our luck. I'm running a 4500 and have found a few sub-grammers and a couple of one grammers in Otago, (I'm from Dunedin) but in all my decades pottering around with gold, I'm still to crack an ounce...in total!!!
   To the best of your knowledge, are the local cockies fairly amenable in giving permission to wander their paddocks?
   I'm currently using the CT 10x5 mono and think I've got it fairly well sussed, but would it be worthwhile running the CT mini UFO? I've had it a while but only tried it once on the 4500 and am having a bit of trouble balancing and quieting it down. If the diggings are quite shallow I'll probably stick to the smaller coil, but would like to crack the virgin UFO!
   Again guys, thanks heaps for your postings, and I'll let you know after xmas how we got on.

Rick.

Hi Aloysius
I have never been refused entry, but then, I used to be a local. All you can do is ask and you don't have to travel far.  I mainly used a 10" Joey mono loop but for the deep stuff I only ever went as big as a 14" Nuggetfinder mono which is a superb coil.  Ask at thexxxHotel at xxx who owns what and they should be able to help.  That is a good area to carefully check the heaps as I have picked quite a few off them in the past.
If I can help more I will.  This will give you an idea.     x  The little shearing shed shown near the fork in the road is one shown in my photos. Sadly the cloud mucks up the Google image or I could tell you more.
**EDITED TO STOP IDIOTS TRAMPLING EVERYWHERE WITHOUT ASKING PERMISSION**
The Cat

must be nice ,wish i was there!

Great stuff JW.....

Cheers Dave, It certainly was a lot of fun. Hope all is well with you.

All the best

JW

Just goes to show, new blood and confidence breeds results along with a touch of patience and expertise.
Congratulations John and we will discuss further spots around there before you go next time. Maybe I might be able to meet you there next time but there are a lot of ifs at this point.  At least you have a starting point for next time.
Dont you just love that super quiet ground?  If there is a signal, it is usually gold. And no long grass, snakes, or lantana to deal with.
Gotta love NZ.

The Cat

     Love the pix and stories and lets thank the real culprit for all the largess--NEW DETECTORS ROCK THE NUGGETSHOOTING WORLD--gotta love science-tons a au 2 u 2 -John   

G'day Hoser John, Thank you. It was a buzz to say the least. Hope the coming year is good to you on the gold front.

Wildcat, Yes an absolute bonus that the ground has never been worked for gold EVER except for your uncles hard rock mine at 300 odd meters away. Working by himself on that smaller scale just plodding away has left no junk around. Not like up here in the Coromandel where the hills have been honey combed to death by many a company for many a year by the old day hard rock miners & the ground everywhere is just a mess with their iron rubbish & junk of all sorts of crap that drives you nuts when trying to detect.
The Coromandel was never known for alluvial gold & certainly not for nuggets. It was all quartz crushing country & the best you could hope to do with a detector it to find a good quartz specimen piece. Sadly for me the junk has got the better of me & I have all but given up detecting up here.
Here are a couple of little specimen bits I have found with a sluice box in a Coromandel creek












 *****......I did find a few .22 shells & lead bullet heads from rabbit shooters & some pieces of metal shards that have probably come off the blade of an excavator as there has been a bit of prospecting lately by some gold companys & hence the turned over boulders I mentiond earlier. My mate found quite a few shotgun pellets with his Xterra 70. Shows the sensertivity of his Xterra on those shallow close to the surface targets but sadly for him the gold was a bit deeper into the compacted shatted schist. So yes it was a pleasure detecting there compared to up here. I will put up some more pics at a later date of the surrounding country taken from on this property. Stunning scenery.

Happy golding all

JW  

Well done you buggers! I say this because you beat me by a week or so! I was going to go at Xmas time, but didn't get to the site, however (two weekends back) I went and had a squiz with my 5x10. Saw all the filled-in (well done) holes and scrape marks, and thought "bugga, too late". Especially that deep hole you dug. I thought at the time that somebody had got something decent out of there! However, perservered for about 4 hours in that general vicinity, and further out to no avail. I did put on the mini UFO for a while but absolutely nothing! Only in that general area of the two rocks did I get 5 minute nuglets (big specks really) They each averaged just over 0.2 gms, for a total of a fraction over a gram in total!

   Although a small take that day, I thoroughly enjoyed getting those little pieces as it showed that at the very least I think I've got the 5x10 sussed.

   Having spoken to a local afterward, he said that he's seen a couple of guys up there a week or so back, which was obviously you, so well done!

Cheers and more good golding to you! (and thanks Wildcat for the opportunity!!!)

Much appreciated,
   Goldnugget

Hope you at least had fun Aloysius. That's what it's all about. Losing yourself in Nature... Pity you missed JW up there.
Incidentally JW, I have been informed that the Minelabs tend to ignore shotgun pellets unless they are large ones. That has been the case with the 3 Minelabs I have owned. (Not counting the Xterra 70)
Now, I don't know whether to own up or not, but me and my brothers are responsible for most of those .22 slugs and shells and plenty of pellets too. In our younger days we shot rabbits nearly every day around those hills and went spotlighting hares at night time. The local rabbit board used to supply us ammo as we cleaned up so many. I remember one evening with my .22 auto I shot 64 rabbits with 64 bullets. Hopefully most of those bullets stayed in the bunnies rather than on nugget ground.  The rabbits caused serious erosion in those days. Mind you, after a thunderstorm you could always find small nuggets in the gullies because of the erosion. My wife and I would not hesitate to buy that block if we could, knowing what is there and where it is. A backhoe and bucket would work wonders. I would miss the Aussie weather though. I know how cold perma frost is. Still, if we were retired.....

G'day Aloysius, I was wondering if you managed to get there. I almost didnt.
 Interesting that you got those .2 grammers. I really worked that ground over in the vicinity of those two rocks with 4 different size coils & all very slowly. All mono's. My smallest was two around .3 One found with the 10x5 & one with the 11". How deep down did you find them? Just goes to show, no one gets it all. I believe that different days can also have different results with differing weather conditions having an effect on ground conditions & conductivity etc.

G'day Wildcat, It was ok to be digging up the odd shell & bullet head. They certainly had a sound all to themselves compared to the gold. They were always very near the surface, a very postive signal & found very quickly. Was good to keep you on your toes & not drifting off to la la land.
 I had heard that the minelabs werent too sensitive on gunshot but if the gold was the same size they would probably miss that as well. Hence some of the higher frequency VLF machines (Gold bug 2 & Whites MXT) being deadly on that really small stuff, as long as it is close to the surface.
Wow....you must have got you fair share of bunnies. 64 for 64 thats as good as you can get, unless you can get two bunnies for one shot   Guess that happened on occations as well. Must admit, I scanned all the bunny holes & their diggings as well. No luck there though.


Happy golding

JW

Gorgeous pictures with all kinds of history and fantastic scenery--great shots of the gold too. You've done an incredible job.

I met a guy from New Zealand when I was mining in Alaska--he'd mine the beaches around Nome in his winter, and return to mine gold in NZ during his summer season. He did very well. Nice fellow.

All the best,

Lanny

Hi there Lanny in AB, The world is full of coincidences & this one none the less so.....I get on my computer this morning, as I arent back at work yet since my xmas break, to see what additions if any have been added to this thread. I guess my interest & involvement in this thread is due to the kind sharing of info & a location by Wildcat, now living in Austarlia, & the luck I had from it in one of the most beautiful places on the face of this planet, Central Otago New Zealand!!
 The coincidence is this........I see your post on this thread on first firing up my computer this morning, when last night the last posts & thread I read before switching off & hitting the hay was your postings on the thread you started on Bedrock Gold......I read the lot, took a while, & must say you do a good yarn & a lot of great info in there as well. Thanks very much for the huge effort & the time you put in to it & sharing your adventures with us. . You should write a book.

All the best & happy golding

Regards

JW

Thanks so much JW, for your encouragement, and for your compliments. Now, I'll beat a hasty retreat from this posting so I'm not guilty of hijacking such a great thread!!

All the best,

Lanny

Hi guys,
   Those 5 x 0.2 grammers that I did get, I had to work really really hard for! If wildcat hadn't pinpointed the area, I'm sure I wouldn't have got them. I would have just gone over it fairly smartly, got nothing and moved on, I'm sure. Because the area was defined, I (as usual worked my 4500 on sensitive extra and very slow) and when getting a 'possible' signal, would hit it from several angles and with the coil actually right on the ground. Even if it was consistently 'iffy', I figured there was something there, and not just the coil bumping the ground. The depth I got them at would be about an inch, certainly no more then two anyway, and I certainly had to spend quite of time getting them out of the dirt!
   Looking at then=m now, 2 are quite flat 6mm long and no more than 2mm wide. The other 3 are a little fatter-no more than 4mm long and 2mm wide.
   I also hit several shotgun pellets, 2 of which I'm sure were steel ones which surprised me. The rest were lead, plus there were a couple of .22 bullets as well as a .22 shell as well as a shotgun cartridge. This was all with an old orange Coiltek 5x10.
   As I say I had to go reeeeaaaaal slow, reeeeaaal low and work for the little buggers. Was quite a lesson for me actually!

Cheers.

Ah well aloysius, if there had been a bigger one I have no doubt you would have got it.
Cheers mate
The Cat

Wildcat, just curious, and maybe you've already answered this question, but how many years have you been chasin' the gold?

All the best,

Lanny

Lanny, can't tell you.  We used to be dragged along from about age 4. Up into the hills, collect specis. Home and crush in the dolly pot, then pan it off. I never took it seriously until detectors came out  and got my first in about 1977. Been looking for the retirement fund ever since. I am now 61.
Cheers
The Cat

Well--you're well-inducted into the mining order, and well-versed it sounds like--and I sincerely admire your posts and your photographs--great job!! Keep 'em coming.

I started when I was 12, much later in life than you did, and I've been at it for over four decades--I've put lots of concentrated effort into the last two decades, and the more I learn, the more I realize there is to learn. It's one of the great ironies of chasing the gold, I guess.

All the best,

Lanny

Never look too hard...  I guess that is something I learned with the detector. It is true, gold is where you find it, and some of the places I have picked it up, I just cant work out where it came from.  Just keep swingin' and enjoy the stroll and maybe you get lucky now and again. There are no real good areas around here for panning or sluicing, however there are quite a number of places for detecting that have produced fairly well over the years. I am starting to think that I must have found most of it as it seems to be getting harder to find lately.  Maybe age comes into the equation as well. Last gold I found was a ring in a local creek when I was road testing my new MXT. I hope to get out to the goldfields again before too long. It takes me about 1 1/2 hours drive so it's not too far.

Regards
The Cat

Fantastic post!!I would love to see some of the relics you dig around those camps too!!

Thanks Kuger,  I see you have a nice range of detectors. Which is your favourite?

Regards
The Cat

Hello Wildcat,The M.X.T,just because thats my main machine.

Hi there Kuger, I see you have the GMT as well. Which one do you think is best on gold only? I have done a lot of reading on forums to see what people say about the verious vlf's for gold detecting. It has come down to the Gold Bug 2, the GMT & the MXT. The MXT appears to be a coin machine as well & is that why you have it as your favourite, because it is pretty good at doing both gold & coins/relics? I am interested in gold only from a vlf machine. Im looking for something to get those real small suckers that my GP 3000 wont or cant. I like the idea of the "follow the black sand" from the GMT. Does the MXT do the same thing? Be good to be able to plot the highest concerntration run of the black sands in a creek/stream & then go through with a dredge/highbanker & clean up that path.
Any help would be much appreciated.

Many thanks & happy golding.

Regards

JW 

Hi there Wildcat, You tiger you , Yep I spent a fair bit of time looking at that slope, the chinamen stones, the schist, the heaps of quartz float all over the place, thinking of your uncles hard rock mine somewhere further up, try to make sense & rhyme & reason as to why/how the gold got to where it got & where it came from. Does your head in & like you said, "Gold is where you find it". I climbed up to the top flat part of that slope & the chinman stones cut out, or seemd to cut out cause I couldnt see any more of them. But the theory of loaming for gold & the fact your uncle had a hard rock mine somewhere above that you have some great specimens from, would/could indicate that the gold could have come from that as it is down slope from it. But then of coarse we know Central Otago has been through a torturous time in its geological make up. With faulting & folding, land upheavial & down folding, massive glaciation which is a mountain & gold bearing quartz reefs demolisher & huge transporter of material that has been carried god knows how many miles from it original source when it is dumped by a retreating glacier when the ride is over & the glacier movement stops, the ice melts & dumps its load, gold included, in no particular place that today makes any sense. Check out the photo of the glacier I put up earlier in this thread & take a look at the rock material riding on it.
But wouldnt an excavator be a grate tools to have to carve off a couple on inches & work up hill loaming & detecting toward your uncles hard rock mine.

Happy golding

JW     

Hi there Kuger, I see you have the GMT as well. Which one do you think is best on gold only? I have done a lot of reading on forums to see what people say about the verious vlf's for gold detecting. It has come down to the Gold Bug 2, the GMT & the MXT. The MXT appears to be a coin machine as well & is that why you have it as your favourite, because it is pretty good at doing both gold & coins/relics? I am interested in gold only from a vlf machine. Im looking for something to get those real small suckers that my GP 3000 wont or cant. I like the idea of the "follow the black sand" from the GMT. Does the MXT do the same thing? Be good to be able to plot the highest concerntration run of the black sands in a creek/stream & then go through with a dredge/highbanker & clean up that path.
Any help would be much appreciated.

Many thanks & happy golding.

Regards

JW 

Hello JW,I have to admit I have not spent the time detecting for gold as I probably should.I do stay abreast of whats working and whats not,and research to the end.The G.M.T. is an incredible machine that hangs with the best of em,especially specie gold(on quartz and such)something about the make up of the rock and such causes the M/L machines to fall short in that dept.I have used the G/B and was impressed with its ability to pick up extremely small gold but I think the GMT offers that and then some.
The MXT is a very versatile machine as well and I have friends that have found an incredible amount of gold to attest to that fact.I hunt mostly relics and it is a monster at that!I can also tell you I have dug pants rivets at 10" deep!!You can track black sand with it by watching your ground read out while in the prospecting mode too

JW  I concur with Kuger. After using my MXT it is a far more interesting machine when goldhunting as it has the LCD readout that tells you, 1. Ground mineralization, 2. Iron content of target (very low reading is indicative of gold)  3. VDI of target.   It gives you all these 3 at the same time on the screen.
So if you get a VDI of around 40 or below and your Iron Content is 10 - 20 at the same time, it is a good chance it is gold.  I have never been a fan of large coils that most use on the Minelab machines and as I mostly used my 10" coil I could see no need for the 4000 so I sold it.
Love the MXT.
Re your last comment on the excavator....  Wouldn't a grader be great on that hill?

The Cat

G'day Wildcat & Kuger, Doesnt the GMT have an LCD readout as well??
Yes lots of people love the MXT. I need to try them both & a bug2. Opinion seems to be the bug 2 will find the smallest gold, which makes sense as it has the highest frequency. The whites machines will find maybe not quite as small as the bug 2 but they will go deeper.
Wildcat, didnt you say you found lots of small gold with a bug 2 amongst the old diggings? Was that at Ophir? I did drive down that gravel road that goes down to the river. All those river flats have been heavily cultivated. All be it still very dry & rubbley. Not much top soil or grass. Do you still have the bug 2 & use it? WHY DID YOU SELL YOUR 4000? The coil excuse doesnt make sense. They are a great machine. Is that your 4000 in your first pic in this thread with the "babies" on it?? I thought you said you had a 3000 & I thought that pic was the 3000?? If you fitted a larger coil then you are going to find bigger deeper gold.
A grader at the hill......yes yes yes. I was thinking excavator with a wide scraping blade & an excavator for trenching. Im in love with that hill it haunts me Wouldnt it be great to have a back yard like that to keep one out of trouble & the toys to play on it??

Take care & happy golding

JW  

One hundred and twenty nuggets!?! Where's the story of that hunt? I'd love to read that one.  Send me a copy or post it, please.

All the best,

Lanny

Hi Lanny and all.  I gave up counting , but this was over a period of several years. Every time I went out I would find anything from 3 to 8 nuggets. 8 was my best day. Most were small but many around 5 - 6 or more grams. There was a mineshaft right on top of this small hill. The largest nugget found was around 7.5 oz but not by me sadly. This was at a depth claimed to be nearly 1 meter.
Other pics show some of my daily nugget finds and the “nugget hill” behind the car. This post relates to Australia.
Cheers
The Cat

Cat--what a haul! That is a most impressive haul--well done. Those are some gorgeous pieces. Thanks so much for posting the pictures--you've got me drooling just looking at all of that incredible nugget gold.

All the best,

Lanny

G'day Wildcat. Very nice gold. Well done
The Triangle paddock. That makes sense as it is surrounded by three roads. Thanks also for your comments on the MXT & the other detectors. So you reckon the MXT is just as good as the GMT at finding gold?? If there was only small gold & nothing else I guess small gold is better than no gold. It does all add up. I went over that area of the slope amongst the chinamen stones with 4 different coils & very slowly. All mono's, 8" mine lab commander, 10x5 coiltek elliptical, 11" minelab dedicated mono not the 11" DD that you can use as a pesudo mono & the coiltek 24"X12" UFO coil. I got gold with each coil except the 8".
I went out today up behind Thames with the 3000. Exspecting to get heaps of rubbish which is the norm. Used the 10"x5" joey mono & also took along a coiltek mini ufo mono. No DD which I probably should have taken as I got heaps of signals off a black rock that was all over the place. Big & small.....pain in the butt & I couldnt tune it out. It wasnt iron stone either. So I gave up on that as the little creek was very rock & bouldery & heavy bush either side & not a lot of beachs........none really & very little gravel. There was a bit of bed rock but nothing in the crevices except those pasty black rocks. GGGGGrrrrrrr. So I did some test pans on some cracks n crevices just to see what the creek had in it. Used my crevicing tools & my little hand sucker pump & bugger me......got a beautiful wirey fish net matted little nugget amongst some fines. Very hokey pokey with a little bit of clear quartz still embedded in some of it. Measures 10mm x 15mm X 5mm . I'll get a photo of it up tomorrow. Looks beautiful under a magnifying glass.

Lanny......Love your stories mate. Keep them coming. You must have a lot of idle time on your hands. Are you house bound by snow & cant get out amongst it??

I'm nacked so I'm off to bed. Nighty night.   

JW     

Well done JW. I look forward to the piccy.  I may be off line for a day or two as I am changing Internet service providers. Already well over my allocation for the month and at 25c a Mb it all adds up to too much.
Will be back.....
The Cat

Hi guys, This probably doesnt belong on this thread under "metal detecting for gold" as it wasnt found with a detector but I had started out detecting until those pesty "hot rocks" drove me nuts. Nuttier that I all ready are.
This is typical of the gold I find on the Coromandel. As I have said before, very rough & hokey pokey. Hasnt had the erosive forces & pounding of glaciers & streams & hasnt travelled very far to get water worn either. The Coromandel Peninsula was a very active volcanic zone in it geolocical make up & said to be very young geographically. Hence I suppose the lack of destruction & freeing up of the gold from the reefs to produce the alluvial.  Usualy has a fairly high silver content as well.
The Coromandel was famous for its hard rock mines not alluvial & in Coromandel township area itself & Thames for there very rich bonanza loads. For example one of the mines in Thames, The Caladonian, in one year alone, 1871, produced 10 ton of bullion worth at 2008 values, $200 million. It is said there was more gold than quartz & the stampers were getting cloged up with gold. What a bugger aye Dont you hate that when you stampers get cloged up with gold.
Here are my pics of the wee piece I found. I arent the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to computers & loading pics so I have put up one of each side of the piece in the palm of my hand & between my fingers & a couple zoomed up on to see the wirey pattens.

 











We have a crap day weather wise today. I was going to rough it out in the bush last night but heard the forcast & decided against it.

Happy golding

JW
     

Wow--isn't it incredibly beautiful, the jewelry that nature creates all on her own? Magnificent specimen. And yes, I am snow and ice bound right now, but that gives me some time to get ideas and stories organized, because during gold hunting season, I'm out every chance I get--no time for writing and re-writing then. Thanks for the compliments. And, thanks for posting the photos of one of nature's perfect treasures.

All the best,

Lanny

kiwi,that's an awsome nuggett -the carachter is very impressive! just put on a bezel and you are good to go!

thats a beautiful peice of specimend wire gold!

Hi guys, Thanks. It is very similar to the specimen pieces I put up pics of earlier. Only those ones are a bit more worn & came from a creek about 10 k's further up the coast. You can still see the wirey nature of them all the same & they came from one of the very few areas that was ground sluiced for dendrital/alluvial gold in the Coromandel. I am guessing that they used the little creek as a natural sluice box due to its small & bed rocky nature. I did quite well with my little 2" suction nozzle dredge set up cleaning out the bed rock cracks & crevices in there. The piece I found in the weekend came from a creek that wasnt ground sluiced & to my knowledge & research wasnt turned over for alluvial. So I am keen to get a dredge in there. Maybe a gravity dredge as it has good fall to operate one & there are houses not far away, so dont really want the noise of a motor/pump giving me away.

Happy golding

JW

What a strange nugget, but a beauty at the same time.
 I have attached a photo of some wire gold found at Poolburn. It is quite fragile and I have to be carefull handling it.

The Cat

wildcat,that is a very unusual nuggett thats a one of a kind there.kind of like a very expensive rat nest.but a lot more fragile.definant cool piece

That's like an exotic, alien nugget--I've never seen the like. I've found wire gold a handful of times, but what you've got there is a rare gem, that's for certain.

All the best,

Lanny

Hi Wildcat,

I don't keep up with such things, but depending on the size...I wonder if a museum would be interested in that piece. The photos and material presented here have been extraordinary. 

All the best, and HH,

Jim.

G'day Wildcat, That is amazing. Did you find it detecting?

JW 

Interesting thread Guys, but I must object to the term "Chinamen stones" Not P.C. any more, as this was a direct derogatory reference to the similarity of the stones colour to that of the Cantonese oriental skin, and we all know they were despised in those days by the majority.

The accepted public term these days is "Sarsen stones" after a similarly silica cemented stone common in the British Isles.

Cheers.

Yes JW, All your statement is correct. That piccy was taken just down the road from where you were. As for the name of the boulders, they have always been called that since I was a kid and I am not about to change due to what I call 'pc bs'. At the same time unconformity, it is not my intention to offend anyone, nor do I lecture anyone else. I have outstanding respect for the Chinese who were on the goldfields. I have seen the extent of their work first hand and I know how they were treated. I will not be making any further comment on this issue.

The Cat

Hi All, I am with Wildcat on this one & for the same reasons as well. I too mean nothing derogatory  or offensive & nobody does, but that termanology of this type of rock is known by all in this district & beyond for more than one hundred & forty years. If you called them by any other name no one would really know what you were talking about. Ok a geo might but no one else.  I too have a great respect for the chinese miners of old & so to did a lot of the european miners, even in the old days as well. It just takes a small minority, like anything.

Try not to shed a tear as you read this poem, based on fact & in the Ida Valley area not too far from the centre of where this whole thread is based.

'ODE TO JOE SHUM 1888-1928'

High up in the Upper Kyeburn lived a gentalman named Shum, he was tall & straight & silent & loved by every one. He lived up in the mountains not far from the Buster Trail, in a small but tidy sod hut with a doorstep made from shale.

One of the last of the Chinese miners, Joe arrived here as a boy, & he learnt to love the gold fields that gave him spirit & brought him joy. He had a dog named Mungo who was a faithful friend & true, & he watched Joe work his gold claim from the dawn 'till the evening dew.

Some times the lonely miner his body needs a break, he needs to find an opening he needs to find that gate. So Shum set off to Naseby where he knew he'd meet his kind, some friendships to rekindle & some perhaps to bind.

Now the word soon reached the township that kindly "Shum come soon!", so the children fled to the post office for the race was on at noon. From the post office to the corner the race was up & down & Shum arranged it monthly when he bought his stores in town.

He lined up all the children - any cheating earned a frown, & the first one back to the starting point received a Half-a-Crown. Then up to busy Leven Street for there stood the Chinese Den & some Pakapoo & Fantan & the journey home again.

On a trip back to his homeland Joe married two lovely wives but times were tough in China & he found it hard to survive. So he returned to the Kyeburn Diggings for he loved the lifestyle there & he worked his lowly gold claim with an energy now so rear.

Now the reason I write this history is to take you back in time, for the murder of Joe the Chinaman was the century's greatest crime.


He hosted a man named Hardie in his warm & friendly shack, but as Joe fixed the evening meal Hardie shot him in the back. Taking Shum's own hunting rifle from the corner where it stood, for when the snow lay thick on the ground it was his only source of food.

They discovered Shum on the morrow, he lay there on the floor, they found him in a pool of blood where he'd crawled towards the door. They also found a footprint in the damp & clinging earth, & at the trial of William Hardie it became his final curse.

But the story of Joe the miner is a story without a cry, & regardless of brutes like Hardie, his good deeds will never die.

There's a bridge in the Upper Kyeburn it spans the German Creek, & if you lean there dead on midnight on July the 17th & listen to the willows you will hear the branches weep, you'll hear the Chinese singsong & the shuffling of their feet, you'll hear their shovels scraping & the stacking of the stones, you'll feel their bodies straighten & sense their woeful groans.

My story has to end here as there's no more I can tell - all I know is Hardie's down below & serving time in hell, while Joe the kindly miner is living like a dream, & he wears a shining heavenly smile as he works the illustrious seam.

by Des  Style.

JW

Interesting thread Guys, but I must object to the term "Chinamen stones" Not P.C. any more, as this was a direct derogatory reference to the similarity of the stones colour to that of the Cantonese oriental skin, and we all know they were despised in those days by the majority.

The accepted public term these days is "Sarsen stones" after a similarly silica cemented stone common in the British Isles.

Cheers.

Lighten UP!!Thats the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard!It had nothing to do with the color of the rocks,but with the fact that Chinese workings are easily disernable by the labourous way they stacked excess rocks to get the out of the way.It was smart too as other races just tossed the aside often covering up good ground!
We used to have a "name",for head",sized rocks too!!

Lighten UP!!Thats the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard!It had nothing to do with the color of the rocks,but with the fact that Chinese workings are easily disernable by the labourous way they stacked excess rocks to get the out of the way.It was smart too as other races just tossed the aside often covering up good ground!
We used to have a "name",for head",sized rocks too!!

Sorry kuger, but you're wrong, that's exactly why the racist label was used, many Europeans hated the fact that the industrious, curious chaps were getting any gold at all.

We have a sediment here called "Maori Bottom" called such because of it's brown colour, there are moves to have this reclassified as Pliocene conglomerate to remove the old bias and distasteful reference.

Like Wildcat I was going to leave it at that but because of your "Lighten UP!!" remark I couldn't help myself I would whiten up if I could, but it's only skin deep isn't it.

Now I will go away and make no further comment about this issue.
Unconformity.   

WELL THAT FIGURES,I guess we will agree to disagree,however I am not wrong.There were more Chinese in my area than any other gold field in the world,and I am quite versed in there history,I think there are much more important things going on in our world right now than the name or color of a rock.How have you gotten through life being so wronged?

Hi all, Unconformity this is a GOLD forum. Not a forum for dredging, no pun intended, up the likes of what you are doing. Some things just develope & stick & become main stream, like the termanology of the two things you have mentiond. Yes they were called Chinamen stones for the reason you say. Weather its "politicly correct", oops sorry "PC" or not today, I am sure we as "intelligent" individules can get our heads around it & move on. Just like you should do. As I said, this is a GOLD forum & I see your very first post & probably the reason you became a member of this excellent site was to flex your "PC" muscle. From other forums I have belonged to the likes of you dont let things rest because it is your likes nature. Prove me wrong. But please dont interupt this thread or any others on this site with something that has nothing to do with it or with golding matters.
If you cant, can you please go & haunt some other site.

JW   

Hi all, Unconformity this is a GOLD forum. Not a forum for dredging, no pun intended, up the likes of what you are doing. Some things just develope & stick & become main stream, like the termanology of the two things you have mentiond. Yes they were called Chinamen stones for the reason you say. Weather its "politicly correct", oops sorry "PC" or not today, I am sure we as "intelligent" individules can get our heads around it & move on. Just like you should do. As I said, this is a GOLD forum & I see your very first post & probably the reason you became a member of this excellent site was to flex your "PC" muscle. From other forums I have belonged to the likes of you dont let things rest because it is your likes nature. Prove me wrong. But please dont interupt this thread or any others on this site with something that has nothing to do with it or with golding matters.
If you cant, can you please go & haunt some other site.

JW   

AMEN,I apologise to everyone ELSE

back to regularly scheduled programming...o.k.where's some more aussie pics?

I think we will have to start another thread. This one is huge! Here is another piccy of Aussie and NZ gold.
The larger nugget was found at Poolburn under one of the large boulders on top of the hill.
Regards
The Cat

Now--that's fine looking gold! And, this is what this fine thread is all about--well done. Nice, clear pictures of the Poolburn gold.

Happy to see peace has been made--so glad to see this thread focused on the gold hunt once again.

All the best,

Lanny

Killer gold,man....

Beautiful stuff Wildcat, thanks for getting this thread refocused. JW...excellent post.

Jim.

thats better cat,got to stay focused!!!!!!!i love that aussie gold! it has a good character,and i would love to see that part of the country.amazing how good spots over there are not what you would look for over here,desert and mountain differ dramaticly.

Wildcat, now with nuggets found scattered around on the hillside, would you consider doing some earth moving and sampling around to what may lie hidden deeper?

Jim.

G'day Wildcat, That last pic of your gold with the large piece from poolburn. Is all the smooth gold NZ gold & the rough gold Aussy? Whats the weight of that big sucker? Very nice gold. I wish I was back on that slope It certainly is easy detecting. Your photos of it show the grass to be pretty green, when I was there there wasnt a green blade of grass to be seen. Check my pics of it.
I have just got back from that creek up behind Thames where I found that little wirey gold nugget last weekend. I went there this time with a little 3" suction nozzle dredge set up. Got a few little bits but nothing like the last one. Nothing quite like bending over a suction nozzle all day to give the back a hard time. Probably take 3 days to come right now.

Happy golding

JW

JW. The larger nugget is 1 oz.  The rest are Aussie nuggets. (or should I say nuggets from areas in Australia to be PC)
Jim. It seems that some company has proclaimed rights over the whole district now therefore I would not be able to go in with a grader or dozer. However I do have an excellent knowledge of the whole area and know where 'things' are.  This place is good, but there are a number of other spots that you wouldn't pick if you were wandering around. If I had 2.5 million I could buy the place. However I would like the block next door too The only problem is, I have a little piece of semi tropical paradise in Australia that I would hate to leave. Looks like I may have to renew my passport and go for a trip one day. I have a friend that I can stay with in Alexandra. It is only a half hour drive from there. There is some outstanding history in that region and many tales of miners losing their lives in the snows and never being found. It would be a fair assumption that there would be quite a number of little bags of nuggets lying in amongst bones on the Dunstan and other Ranges in the region. I found a cave down the Clutha River once and crawled inside. It was quite large and there was a large flat rock in the middle of it. My detector sounded off and so I moved the rock. (I was strong in those days) Underneath I found an old miners pick and chisels but unfortunately no cache. However, there may very well be one as there are remnants of an old stone house not too far away.  BTW, you need a boat to get down the river.
For the info of you Americanos...  NZ is only a 3 hour flight from Brisbane, Australia. Flights can be as cheap as $200.00 sometimes.
Cheers for now

The Cat

Wildcat, thanks for the background. I take it then, that if you could, you would pursue it. Makes sense. Another thing, I sure like your "diggs" (homeplace), a great photo. Don't blame you for staying home a bit.

On a much smaller scale, I always investigate further. Yep its work, but that's how we find minerals. There's nothing of "romanticism" or "high adventure" about sluggin' it out in the bush, soaked in sweat, black flies going for your eyes, a sore back...and often little or nothing to show for it. But you gotta do it if you want a chance at a bonanza.

I had such a situation this past autumn at the base of a sharply inclined tailings pile. Found one small, but nice chunk of silver, and noticed some ruby silver on it. We don't often find that stuff. If I had a decent photo I'd post it. More often than not by far, one chunk of any kind of silver is all you're going to find. But there are exceptions.

I widened the hole, rechecked and sure enough another piece surfaced. I wound up several days later with an excavation...one rock at a time...maybe eight feet long by maybe three feet wide and easily two feet down. I kept finding more pieces, and the final tally was about 18 lbs. Most of it had a goodly amount of ruby silver on it. Not the beautiful crystals we see in textbooks, just small rounded masses attached to and often running through the calcite.

As a little sidenote, this ruby silver is unusually soft. If you abrade it with a dremel stone bit (diamond chip green stones), it'll go blood red. But when you wash and dry it, it returns to the same dull color and semi-metallic (is there such a word?) lustre it had prior to abrasion. But now, as usual, I'm going off topic.

That's why I asked the question about removing material and rechecking. You might be surprised what I learn here by asking questions of, and from reading comments made by experienced gold hunters. So, it's good to have you confirm my thinking, with thanks...  

Jim.

Just a quick post. Thanks to all of you for your comments. This photo shows the hillside with all the boulders where nuggets are scattered. Beautiful ground to work with detectors.

The Cat

You know, I'd never figure the gold would be on that hill in that boulder field--the rocks are too rough around the edges--here we're always looking for stream-worn, or glacial river worn rocks as an indicator. That's quite the hill, and quite the little honey hole you've got there. I'll bet you had some fun there, from looking at the pictures of the gold you found.

All the best,

Lanny

JW. The larger nugget is 1 oz.  The rest are Aussie nuggets. (or should I say nuggets from areas in Australia to be PC)
Jim. It seems that some company has proclaimed rights over the whole district now therefore I would not be able to go in with a grader or dozer. However I do have an excellent knowledge of the whole area and know where 'things' are.  This place is good, but there are a number of other spots that you wouldn't pick if you were wandering around. If I had 2.5 million I could buy the place, but I wouldn't as he wants far too much for it. However I would like the block next door too and I could jump the fence from there. (naughty)  The only problem is, I have a little piece of semi tropical paradise in Australia that I would hate to leave. Looks like I may have to renew my passport and go for a trip one day. I have a friend that I can stay with in Alexandra. It is only a half hour drive from there. There is some outstanding history in that region and many tales of miners losing their lives in the snows and never being found. It would be a fair assumption that there would be quite a number of little bags of nuggets lying in amongst bones on the Dunstan and other Ranges in the region. I found a cave down the Clutha River once and crawled inside. It was quite large and there was a large flat rock in the middle of it. My detector sounded off and so I moved the rock. (I was strong in those days) Underneath I found an old miners pick and chisels but unfortunately no cache. However, there may very well be one as there are remnants of an old stone house not too far away.  BTW, you need a boat to get down the river.
For the info of you Americanos...  NZ is only a 3 hour flight from Brisbane, Australia. Flights can be as cheap as $200.00 sometimes.
Cheers for now

The Cat

Beautiful picture of paradise all right! Wow--what a little slice of heaven. Quite the story you've told about that flat rock and that cave--well done detecting it and then excavating. I've found similar caches with metal detectors in the past--someone obviously intended (the items I found were cached in the 1800's) to come back and start mining again, but for whatever reason, they never made it back. It sure would be nice to find a cache of nuggets one day--I wish the same for you.

All the best,

Lanny

Strickman One thing I have learned is local knowledge is the best starting point in any gold area. The difference between each state in Australia is chalk and cheese.
The signs in Victoria are totally different to those in Western Australia and Queensland.  I have detected gold mainly in those 3 States and have had a huge learning curve in each of them. New Zealand is different again but closer to Victoria than the other States. My preferences for detecting are: 1. Western Australia, 2. New Zealand, 3. Victoria, then, 4. Queensland, however, there are areas of North Queensland that produce some remarkable finds. I have just  never made it up there. (yet)
Jim  If you want a straight answer re working that area, Yes, I would be like a bull in a china shop.  There is a fine schist a few inches down that the nuggets seem to be comfortable sitting in. This needs to be worked with dry blowers or similar equipment to remove their little butts from their comfy zone. I think it would be a payable proposition. There is also sediment in all the gullies that needs to be removed as there are nuggets down too deep for our machines to detect. And then of course there are proven reefs around there. You could finish up a millionaire, but you need to be one to get started....

Kindest regards
The Cat
 

G'day Cat,
   Brilliant thread (and great photos as well!) Haven't received permission as yet to have a look around properly, so that area will have to wait. However, I was looking at a map of the area, and I see that across the valley, an area called German Hill Diggings. Is it worth a shot do you think with small coil or larger? Any local knowledge hints that may help? As I seem to recollect from my geology days, I think this area is a horst and graben topography, so I'm wondering if the mineralisation is producing the same type of gold at German Hill as at Ophir? I may be way off base here, so feel free to correct me! I have a few books on gold, but I can't recollect seeing German Hill in any. (perhaps deeper research required!)
   In closing, I have to say this would be one of the best sites and best threads I've read.
   Btw Lanny, love your stories! There is nothing like reading somebody's real experiences to help everyone along in this great hobby!

Thanks again Cat,
Cheers all,
Aloysius.

Thanks Wildcat. You know, each insightful comment on this thread from yourself, JW and others is a veritable gem that gets me to thinking. Please keep this "comfy" discussion going, and thanks kindly, 

Jim.

Hi all, Wow....this thread is really getting some momentum. Good to hear from you all & all your comments........ Great you guys are showing soooo much interest in little old New Zealand.
 I dont know where to start in reply........
Yes Lanny you have a majic way & play with words & always a pleasure to read you writtings on your advantures. Always many a useful tip & trick in sussing out those sassy nuggets as well. I couldnt agree with you more on the trout.....as you have observed & stated on them hanging out in low pressure areas.......just like gold. Two key elements of a prospectors search for gold is, "obervation & imagination".
Those Quartz rocks, is that PC enough, on that slope are actualy quite rounded & I would say have been dropped there by a glacier. They are generaly localised to an area & not scatted all over the place every where. In Wildcats pic of this slope you will see a barren patch to the right where there arent any. They seem to just follow that dipping ridge & a little bit around to the left & then they cut out again. The sharper more jagged ones are schist bedrock, commonly called schist tors, huge unshapely masses of rock- weather beaten, geological veterans blackened & seemed & scarred by god knows how many centuries of conflict with the elements. Some prostrate, some erect, others inclining earthwards. Some fanatically grouped, others isolated & solitary. All scattered at irregular intervals


I need to get off to work so will continue tonight.
Here is a pic of the bit of gold I got with my little 3" dedge on saturday. Very rough & coarse.



Happy golding

JW

JW and Cat and all--thanks for your nice comments on the writing--I appreciate it. JW--the rocks really looked rough in the photo--the rocks around here, when they've been tumbled by a glacier or large glacial river are very round--can't seem to find rough edges, but now that you've explained it all--it makes sense. By the way--New Zealand is a much more fascinating place then I'd ever imagined. Nice dredge gold--nugget shooting and dredging are my two primary areas of focus for getting the gold right now. So, it appears we have some common interests. Great thread, both of you!!

All the best,

Lanny

HOLY COW!!!  I just looked up Amazon Books and they have a second hand  NEW ZEALANDS LAST GOLD RUSH  by Heinz  for $123.53
They could be hard to locate but a second hand shop may have any of them.... maybe ..... possibly ..... doubtfully ... luckily?

The Cat

G'day Wildcat, How many copies do you want? I have a vast collection of NZ historical gold mining books & do deal in them. Sort of started off buying them for myself to do research. Research is the key to finding gold. Lots & lots of research. I then realised there was a huge want for these types of books & now buy & sell them. You name it & I have probably got it. I have just sold two copies of Costly Gold & Two lots of the four historic gold trails series. I have a few copies of the ones you mention & many many more.







 One you may hugely be interested in & one I got just prior to your starting of this thread, isnt it a small world, is a 1906 copy from the Department of mines. New Zealand Geological Survey Bulletin No/2. The Geology Of The Area covered by the ALEXANDRA SHEET. Central Otago Division including the survey district of Leaning Rock, Tiger Hill & Poolburn.



Very interesting stuff, 50 pages with old maps showing the land make up, cross sections & gold workings, both alluvial & reef. Alluvial workings around Ophir are: Blacks No/3 diggings, German Gullies No/1, 2, & 3 where the paydirt is mostly shallow & that these slope deposits occur in places where there is no water. Gold bearing loads include Ophir Load, Trig N Load, Red Hills, Chatto Creek, Green's Reef Ophir & Ophir Reef.  It has an old black & white pic of what I reckon is those Chinamen stones, oopps SORRY, I mean those Siliceous Cement Stones that you arrowed in a photo across the Ida Valley & is probably near the German Hills Diggings that Aloysius is refering to.

  

Oh well I better send this off before some thing happens & it gets lost in cyber space.

Happy golding all

JW

JW  You just blew me away.....  lol   Wanna Partner?  hehe   Certainly some of the Ophir Gold Project findings look very rich. Good luck to them. The picture of those 'rocks' scanned up well. Looks like a good prospect for the future.
Cheers
The Cat

Lanny, I ment to mention about those quartz rocks/boulders. Take a good close look at them. Go back to my earlier pics & Wildcats & the one with the gold I found sitting on one of those rocks. They are smooth. There isnt a sharp edge on any of them. They have all been rounded off. Look at the one that I show that has been turned over. The one where the hole from it is where I got the 4.5 grammer. Take a look at the rocks that you can see sitting deep in the ground with just their tops flush with the ground surface. They are smooth & as rounded off as can be. That is from ice grinding over them. Look at the scenery pics of the mountains. They are all very smooth from glaciation & not rugged & jagged from faulting & folding of which they would have been before the glaciation. Here is a pic of the Remarkables Range in Queenstown in the back ground. The tops were above the ice during glaciation but notice how smooth & ground off the tops of the other hill are in the foreground. This was totaly ridden over by ice. You will see the left hand side of the hill where the bed rock has been ground smooth & groves ground into it. Probably by big boulders caught up in the glacial ice like giant sand paper grinding over it & scouring it out.


Here is a shot from a bit further around. Again you will see the very top has escaped the ice, just, while the flanks are smoothed off. This lake is a glacial lake & has its bed way below sea level. You can see from the smoothed off mountains how deep this was buried in ice.



Here is another view looking down over the Arrow Basin towards Queenstown. Again this valley was buried in ice & you can see how smooth & carved out the bed of the valley is & how rounded off the hills are where the ice rode up over them. Probably buried bloody deeply.. The smoothed off hill centre left is the same hill in the first pic above from a different angle.

 

And a live glacier



With smoothed off rock wall



You will see the jumbled up pile of rocks & debry in the foreground, that is the lateral moraine left behind from the retreating glacial ice that has been pushed to the side by an advance of the ice, like a giant bulldozer blade, & then left when the ice melts back in retreat. This material has travelled many miles from it source & it is such material that could be carrying gold bearing material that the glacial ice has smashed & ground & transported many many miles over many many centuries & then just dumps in no paticular place or order as the ice melts & drops it. It is this kind of activity that has dropped the gold on the side of the hill that Wildcat has started this thread on. I believe any way!!  So like they say. "gold is where you find it" Looking at it today can makes no sense as to why it is where it is & you can do your head in trying to work out where it has come from. But if you take on board the glacial theory it puts your mind at rest. All you can do is look for the indicators which in this case & the German Hill Diggings. are the Chinamen Stones. Stuff your PC.



Thats me for tonight

Happy golding all

JW

Great pics JW...you should get in touch with Jim at Sierra books in California..he deals in mining and geology stuff.Very good fellow.

Lanny, I ment to mention about those quartz rocks/boulders. Take a good close look at them. Go back to my earlier pics & Wildcats & the one with the gold I found sitting on one of those rocks. They are smooth. There isnt a sharp edge on any of them. They have all been rounded off. Look at the one that I show that has been turned over. The one where the hole from it is where I got the 4.5 grammer. Take a look at the rocks that you can see sitting deep in the ground with just their tops flush with the ground surface. They are smooth & as rounded off as can be. That is from ice grinding over them. Look at the scenery pics of the mountains. They are all very smooth from glaciation & not rugged & jagged from faulting & folding of which they would have been before the glaciation. Here is a pic of the Remarkables Range in Queenstown in the back ground. The tops were above the ice during glaciation but notice how smooth & ground off the tops of the other hill are in the foreground. This was totaly ridden over by ice. You will see the left hand side of the hill where the bed rock has been ground smooth & groves ground into it. Probably by big boulders caught up in the glacial ice like giant sand paper grinding over it & scouring it out.

Yes--thanks--I now see what you're talking about. The edges are rounded, and from glacial action--much like the rocks I see very close to the mountains--chunks of bedrock that is, that have been tumbled by glacial/glacial stream action. I guess I've been referring to two different things. What I generally refer to as glaciated rocks are the ones that have been tumbled to such an extent that they are "round" or oblong and rounded--you can't find an angle on them anywhere. But, now that I understand that we're talking about the same action that rounds off sharp corners on pieces of bedrock and stone, I understand what you're saying. 

I'll see if I can dig up some pictures of glaciated rock from this area. Beautiful pictures of your mountains and the glaciated areas--and the live glacier!

Thanks again, and all the best,

Lanny

JW  Thought you might be interested in this semi technical explanation of exactly what the MXT is and how it was developed

The Cat

http://whiteselectronics.com/info/field-reports/73.html

Hi there Wildcat, Thanks for that. Very interesting.

Happy hunting

JW 

Hi all, Well I have been down in Central Otago now for just over a month. Work was real bad up home & a phone call had me work down here. So I packed up & headed on down. I am now based in Queenstown but on my way down from my sunny, warm costal place from the base of the Coromandel Peninsula in the north island I called in for a weekend back at this spot to do a bit more detecting.
On my first day I fot 4 little bits all up. The first was a little .44 gram piece. All was found with the 24" X 12" coiltek elliptical UFO coil. I am amazed at the small gold this big coil finds.



Close up of the .44 gram



My 4 bits for the first day



I woke up at 2.30 in the morning feeling rather cold. Felling there was a frost coming on, I knew I had no anti freeze in the radiator of my wagon, I got up & went out to start it to warm it up. On getting outside I saw how light it was & that there was a full moon. I could detect in this with out needing to use a head lamp to get around. So with the wagon idling away I cooked a breaky of sausages, eggs & bacon washed down with a couple of cups of coffee. At 3.30am I rigged up & went out & turned the wagon off & got in to it.
With in an hour I had my first nice mellow signal. I scraped away the shallow surface material & the signal was still there. Down about 4" I was hitting the schist bed rock. The signal was still there, that was a good sign. Usualy a bullet shell or bullet head would have been scraped away at this stage, but not always. Especialy the lead bullet heads & they have that nice mellow signal just like gold. I was feeling pretty confident that this was the goods. I had to start hacking into the schist after pinpointing the targets location. Using the pointed end of the pick to smash into the schist & break it up & using the flat blade to pull the broken up schist & material out. The signal was getting stronger but still that nice soft, mellow sound.
I have a strong rear earth magnet glued in to a hole in the base of my pick handle. This is great for waving over the hole as you go on down so it will pick up any ferrous metal junk.



Suddenly the target was gone. I backed up & scanned my pile of material & there the signal was. I scoped up a handful of broken up schist & waved it over the coil. The target was in my hand. by halfing the pile in my hand to my other hand I wittled the target down & then it just droped out on to the coil. A nice 4.5 gram piece.
That target lead to a nice little patch.



I have since that weekend discovered some old sluiced workings only 15 minutes drive from where I am living that has given up to me just over 12 grams. We have had the first big dump of snow for our winter last weekend. Coronet Peak ski field is opening tomorrow. My gold sluicing spot is on the fringe of the snow line.





The sluiced workings



Not a bad view isnt it??


Gold on the left of the pen is from the old sluiced workings & the gold on the right is from the spot that Wild Cat has shared with us.



I am going back to the old sluiced workings tomorrow to see what else they will give up to me.

Happy golding

JW

great pics ,as always kiwi.  good luck .

Hi Guys, Well the old sluiced workings were kind to me today although the ground was hard digging with the permafrost making it like concrete.



Ended up finding 5 little bits in this rotten schist rock. Thought I was doing ok with 3 but after I took this photo I found 2 more in the same hole.










Got 12 pieces all up for the day for a total of 6 grams. the biggest was 2.2 grams & the smallest .08 of a gram. Found with the little 10" X 5" mono coil & a Minelab 8" mono.

 

Guess I will have to go back again tomorrow.

Happy hunting

JW 

Nice stuff JW...any rough gold with quartz around there?

Hi there Dave. No this gold has been transported by glaciation & is on a very high plataue. Way above any river today. The nearest hard rock mines from the old days are 20 kilometers away. I think one of those is the highest in alttitude in NZ at around 6000 feet asl. Having said that there are a few bits that have quartz attached when viewed with a magnefying glass but they are all pretty rounded & smooth from their journey. I am going back up today but we are in for a crap day this arvo with snow forecast to 300 meters. That will bury these workings for the rest of our winter I would say so I best make the most of this morning.
Hope all is well with you

Regards

JW 

JW

Hey JW  I see your GPS is the same as mine.   You will have to send me that coordinate in case I get over there one day 

The Cat

Hi there Wildcat. Hey no problem. It isnt hard to get to at all. Can drive right to it , jump a fence & your there. It is a bit of an antiquated GPS by todays standards. Not like the ones today that you can plug in to your computer, down load the coordinates on google earth & have your waypoints & path come up on the map. Bloody amazing.
Didnt do so well today. Weather forecast wasnt good but I got up there to make the most of the morning before it really turned to custard. They forecast snow to 200 meters for the arvo.
There was a very light drizzle so I put the old plastic shopping bag over the detector control box. I tried in a different spot as I had gone over the same ground a few times with different coils & the bigger mono's were getting a bit noisy with the wet ground so I put on a DD to get a quieter threshold & used it in the pesudo mono mode. Only found a 1 gram bit & the rain was getting worse & the briar rose bushes had torn the plastic bag so I bailed. The snow hasnt materialised but they are now forecasting it for tomorrow.
We have a public holiday for monday so if the wether isnt too bad I will give it another shot but I think it may have given me all I can find. I will have to find another spot

Happy hunting

JW 
     

G'day Wildcat, JW, all
I managed to get permission from the owner and had a detect around that spot. I thought It'd be pretty well cleaned up seeing as JW had been over it with his 3000, and aloysius with a 4500, but decided that it'd be worth a look anyway. I managed to pick up a few nice pieces, just around that middle area between those two rocks where the schist isn't too deep. It just goes to show from the 4.5 grammer JW picked up that nobody ever gets it all
I was going to bury an easter egg for you to dig up JW, but hunger got the better of me...
I had a great time, Thank-you Wildcat.
Cheers
G.T.

Hi there GT, Well done. When were you there. What size were the pieces did you found & how many? It always amazes me how I can go over the same ground on different days & still pick up pieces. Ophir being no different. Yesterday & today were to be no different as well. I went back up to the old sluiced workings this afternoon as it was raining this morning but it stopped so I went for it. I used the little 10" X 5" mono. Had a bit of fun getting up to the workings as the snow was down lower & that made it pretty slippery. As I negotiated my way down to where I found the 1 gram bit yesterday I detected at a spot that was now covered in snow but I knew there was shallow schist. After a few bum targets I got a small bit of gold. I had been over this ground before & with the same coil. I got nothing more at the 1 gram spot but the snow was worse there & kept sticking to the bottom of the coil. I elected to go back to where I had been getting most of the gold from earlier days & found 3 more bits. All in the same ground I had been over with a number of different coils. The last bit I found it had been snowing for about half an hour. I wish I had taken my camera but I didnt in my rush out the door. All 4 pieces were small at .23, .16,.17 & .14 grams but gold all the same.
Where abouts are you based? Dunedin?

Happy hunting

JW 

Good stuff JW  You won't want to go home now? 

The Cat

Hi there Wildcat, No you are right. Trouble is the snow is going to drive me out of the hills. Not sure where to go from here. May have to try some old workings down by the Kawarau river. Trouble there is they would have been thrashed by every man & his dog due to there easy access. I will need to put my thinking cap on.
Interesting that goldtimer snaged a few at ophir as well. I did notice quite a few "fresh" looking diggings that werent mine & just assumed they were from aloysius. Sure wish I had dug up an easter egg though, that would have had me scratching my head Not sure I will head back there again unless I try else where. Maybe lower down to get out of the snow line. Must go on google earth & see what the altitude is compared to the old sluiced workings I have been working in. I know Naseby has been having its share of snow. My mate from there has bailed to Australia for the winter & is looking at picking up a GP 3500.
Coronet Peak ski field must be having night skiing tonight as the mountain is lit up like a christmas tree.

Happy hunting

JW 

Hi Guys, I forgot to mention that on the sunday after finding the 1 gram piece I found a 1924 English six pence. It must have been lost by a 1930's depression miner. Here is a pic of the weekends total finds.



Happy hunting

JW 

Allow me to be first to say great hunting JW.  Just got home from town so won't get on here till a bit later.

The Cat

G'day JW,
I live in a cool spot, and do a bit of detecting and prospecting on weekends when I can.
There are a few spots here and there that the oldtimers worked, but Sunny places are much more enjoyable with the good climate. And chunkier gold
I stopped in there over the easter break. I ended up with 11 pieces for two days detecting. Just over 10 grams all up.

The biggest bit is 4.3 grams, top left is 1.1, and the top right is 1.8 . The rest are all half a gram or less. The 4.5 I found just  off to the side of the shallow area between the rocks, It was not too bad a signal, but it was hard up against one of those rocks, and there was a bit of tussock beside the rock that I flattened with my boot to get the coil in there. The 1.1 and 1.8 were about 2 metres apart, up the hill a little further. Those two were just a bit of a waver on the threshhold, but took an inch or two off the top and they turn into that nice "gold sound". All of the wee bits I found were not far from the shallow area either, except for two that were out to the side a bit further down the hill. You're right about the going over the same ground and getting more pieces. I went back over an area where I'd got a few wee nuggets before with the 8" mono, and using the same coil was amazed to pick up another two. This was only in a tiny bit of wash that I thought I had cleaned up. I think that having your detector tuned right makes a huge difference. Sometimes when it's running a wee bit ratty and you retune it, it quietens it down heaps, and it makes it easy to hear those quiet targets that you'd otherwise walk straight over.
Anyway I'd better stop rambling
Cheers
G.T.

Hi there GT, Well done. Beautiful gold. I had a feeling it must have been easter with your mention of leaving an easter egg for me to dig up. LOL. That would have been a laugh. When you went back over the ground you thought you had cleaned up, was it the same day or the next day? It amazes me how I can go back over the same ground with different coils & also the same coils & still pick up pieces. It is usually on a different day & I have said this before but I believe that atmosphere conditions influence sensitivity in coils on any given day & if the ground is wet & getting wetter it increases sensitivity & depth. The wet making things more conductive.
The last few times up in these old sluiced workings was very wet from the snow & addmitidly the pieces I was getting were quite small with them being less that .3 of a gram. The bigger pieces I got when the ground was dry & I was able to use the bigger mono's but as the ground got wet & in creased in sensitivity the bigger mono's were getting too noisey to hear those faint threshold sounds of the tiny gold. When I put on the smaller mono's, the 10" X 5" & the 8" round, they were very quiet & I could easily hear those very faint murmers & every time the target was buried inside the folds of schist. Even once the target was out it was still very elusive to finaly have in my gold bottle. A couple of times I just thought that it must have been a bit of ground noise & as I dug in to it I was breaking it up until the signal had gone. But the signal really was too positive in the first place & perserverance paid off in the end.

Happy hunting

JW     

JW, yes you're right - it was on a different day that I was able to pick up the two wee pieces. They were both real shallow, and were so quiet that you had to get the target in your hand, put the dirt onto the coil, then move it round using your fingers until you get a bit of noise. It's pretty small stuff when you have to do that using the 8" mono, but it's all gold and it's all good fun.
That damp gorund is a real pain when you're trying to use the larger monos, also the nig one really doesn't like the powerlines, even when you try and quieten it right down, tune it etc. it still doesn't run nearly as good as the 8" when around powerlines.
That's nice gold that you've been getting around the sluicings. It's quite good fun working some of the sluiced areas with the wee coil- that is as long as you don't walk over a bulletshell on the surface with the 8" mono   Painful on the ears....
I would've thought that all the sluicings around QT would be pretty hammered.  Its funny how sometimes the most obvious spots are the ones that haven't been hit very hard at all, -everyone walks straight past it and thinks that  there's no way there'll be anything there it's too obvious.
Good luck
GT
 

Say Goldtimer,  I would be interested to know what part of Southland you live in. I know the place pretty well
I reckon it would have to be invercargill area the way you use the word 'wee'  lol
The Cat

Hi there GT, Yes it sort of suprised me too. I can be there in 20 minutes from where I live. I have known of them for a long time from research I have done. Even way before my detecting days. There is no water up there so never went up with a pan or box. If you know where to look & what to look for you can see them from the main road. I never saw any thing that looked like a detector dig hole prior to me going there. These workings probably arent all that well known but there are quite a few local detectorists here & I would have thought some of them would have known of these workings & being so close & easy access...... You can drive right to them, jump a fence & you are in them...
Snow is driving me out of them at the moment though. Cancel mode & a DD coil will sort out your interference from powerlines. You will lose a bit of depth & sensitivity though. Never use cancel mode with a mono coil as you will lose all sensitivity & may as well just detect with the detector turned off. You will have just as much luck.  Salt mode will quieten down a mono a bit in wet conditions but again you will lose a bit of sensitivity & depth.
I know full well the scream in the ear of a .22 shell at close range

Happy hunting

JW   

G'day Wildcat - Great spot if you don't mind a bit of rain. There's always something to do down south - duckshooting, whitebaiting, then off chasing the gold in the summer. The main problem is finding enough time to do it all
JW - The 11" standard coil is the only double d that I have, most of the time I can use the monos, but I've used the 11"  in a few really close to the powerlines spots and it's a pretty good coil. How often do you use your 11" mono? A lot of guys on the Aussie forums reckon that they're the best all-round coil on the  new detectors, and I'm wondering whether it'd be worth getting one. The big coil is too big to manouvre round a lot of the workings, and the 8" you have to waddle around like a duck if you're trying to cover large areas of sluicings.
Cheers
GT

Hi GT, The 11" dedicated mono has become my main coil that I use. I found that 18.7 gram piece with it at a good 12" deep & also a .2 gram piece at about 1.5". It was the 11" that I used on my first day at these sluiced workings & found a 4.4 gram at about 6" down into a tight schist crevice. Also got a .73, .43, .98, 1.08 around the same area. That was when the ground was dry.
 The next day I put on the 10" X 5" mono & got a 3.65 gram piece at about 4". I thought I had swept that spot with the 11" the day before but may have just missed hitting that nugget with the "sweet" spot of the 11" mono. The next day the ground was starting to get damp & I tried the 24" X 12" mono but it was a bit noisey & also difficult to swing comfortably in the uneven & steep terrain of the sluiced workings. That is a great coil in open flat areas & my main choice when there to start off with.
 If I can get back to the sluiced workings in the weekend I will try the 17" X 11" DD & the 18" round DD in both DD mode & the pesudo mono mode & see if I can get anything of a desent size at depth. They may prove to be too difficult to manouver. I may have a go at making a swing arm tomorrow to make it a bit easier.

Happy hunting

Regards

JW  

Hi Guys, Well I have learnt a valuable lesson today & one you can all learn from my mistake. It has happened to me twice now at this same spot & only a couple of feet away from each other. The other weekend I went back to a spot where I had some exposed bed rock schist that was giving me three very strong signals that screamed at me .22 shell, .22 shell all in very close proximity to each other. Well last weekend I dug up those targets to get rid of them in case they were masking a good signal from that schist. Well they were not only masking one good signal, but 5.
Today I went back to these old sluiced workings thinking I had pretty much done them over for what ever gold they were going to give me. The bigger mono's were too noisy now in the wet ground & I had been all over them with my smaller mono's & 11"DD. Today I gave the 18" DD a run to see if there was anything of size at depth. I went to the spot where I had dug out those 3 .22 shells & then got those 5 good pieces. Well not 2 feet away there were a number of other loud junk targets that I decided to get rid of. They turned out to be lead bullet heads & then I got a "sweet" target that was a half gram piece of gold with the 18" DD in DD mode. It was only a couple of inches down & had I got rid of those junk targets earlier then any one of my other coils would have snapped it up.
So the lesson is.....GET RID OF ALL JUNK TARGETS!!!! You never know what they may be masking.

Happy hunting

JW     

GT  I only ever used the Joey coil  (11" mono elliptical) and a 14" nuggetfinder mono when working in deepsoil areas. Beautiful coil but too heavy to swing all day long.  I have kept both those coils for when I get the new TDI.... You must have a jar full by now JW... lol

Hi there Doug, The jars have slowen down in their growth as I have only been getting sub gram bits lately & not many at that. Last sunday was 4 bits for a total of .66 grams & yesterday I didnt get up there until just after 2pm & it is dark by 6pm. My wife came with me which is cool as she likes to share in the excitement of the finds. She has even videoed one little piece that I got. But we were only there for about an hour & she was making noises of being cold, GGGGRRRRR %$&* . I had by then found my 1 piece. She was just sitting in a fold up camp chair reading a womans mag & doing a cross word. The sun had gone behind a cloud but I told her to get up & go for a walk around to get warm. There was a bit of snow on the ground but it wasnt too bad. Not as bad as last sunday, but then she didnt come up that afternoon. I then told her to make herself a cup of coffee which she did. I may have managed to drag out another hour but the whimpiring was getting stronger so I relented & packed up & we headed back to the wagon with 1.5 hours of day light left. BUGGER.
We are off today to search some old historic tailings on the edge of Lake Dunstan. Here is a google earth pic of them. Isnt it sort of beautiful. So neatly done. Looking like a fern leave pattern from space. Each rock individually hand stacked in their individual rows with the center "stems" being the tail races. The things man does to chase GOLD.




Happy hunting

JW  

  

JW I know I would have to be finding an awful lot of gold before I went to the trouble of stacking rocks like that, and then again if I was finding it, I think the rocks might be flyin' and lyin' where-ever.  lol

The Cat

Hi there Wildcat, I am back from seeing those sluiced workings & boy are they impressive. They are the result of ground sluicing & not the high water pressure from a hydrolic monitor or those water pressure guns. With ground sluicing they would bring in water from a near by creek through water races & gather the water in dams or reservoirs above the ground they wanted to work.
 This was usually done during the night & the water from the dams was then directed to where they wanted to work the ground. After digging a tail race to allow the tailings & waste material to flow out of the workings the water was allowed to pour over the edge of the claim to wash down material. The bigger rocks & boulders were stacked in such a fashion after they had been washed down from the working face to allow the finer sands & gold to wash down what was to become a central race which would be lined with riffles made of wood, or stone & tussock grass to catch the gold. The rocks were stacked to act as wing walls & so direct the water flow & gold bearing sands & gravels into the central race & sluice box. They also worked on the touch it once principle so that once the rocks were stacked they didny have to be touched or moved again.
I guess they never thought of the patterns they were creating but that it was just the result of their deliberate & methodical engineering & working principle. Allowing the water to do the work in the most efficient way possible. These workings are over 140 years old & the scars they left are a monument to the men who created them & not the usual enviromentaly ugly scars left by this type of mining.

Happy hunting

JW 

It makes you wonder JW when you look at the eagles view just how much gold is further back in the hills. They wouldn't have been able to locate the tailrace too high up as they couldn't have got water up there. Methinks there is still a lot of gold in the dirt there.

The Cat

G'day Wildcat, Yer I was thinking the same thing as I gazed down into them & looked at the unworked portion of the faces they had exposed. I guess they had done their homework & if it was worth their while they could have easily have carried on back up into the hills. They are actually very low down on the flanks of the Dunstan Range. They have probably just worked a rich little (Big) pocket in what looks like a high old Clutha River terrace. The tailing rocks are very round & water worn & look very much like river rocks as opposed to glacial. Also the shear number of them in one localised area. There are smaller sluicings further up & down from these, although on google earth you cant really make those out like these ones. But I noticed them as I walked up to these ones. They are at a spot called Quartz Reef Point & I saw three lines of reef striking in the same direction parallel to each other. They cant have been gold bearing how ever.

Happy hunting

JW 

Hi Guys,
 I went back up to these old sluiced workings on saturday & I still managed to get a bit of gold from the same ground that I have been over numerous times already & with the same coils. The gold is getting small & it takes a keen ear to pick up the slight threshold change that signals a possible target. If the ground is too wet & the coils threshold sound is a tad "noisy" "Mono coil" it is very hard to pick up the very slight threshold change amongst the threshold chatter.
It suprises me at the lack of rubbish items from the old timers amongst the sluicings. I have by far found more .22 shell caseings & old lead bullet heads than general ferrous metal junk items from the actual workings of these sluiceings.
11 pieces for the day for a total of 2.5 grams. All less than 1 gram with the smallest .11 of a gram



Total from these sluiced workings so far is 25.5 grams



Happy hunting

JW 

Well done JW.  You will have that machine trained to pick up dust before too long...

The Cat

G'day Wildcat, Thanks. I am getting a bit over the real small pieces now. It is time to find some new pastures & hopefully bigger bits of over 1 gram. I see now what you mean by "Do you really want to find such small pieces" When I was going on about the Whites GM 4B & picking up all the gold on offer at a spot.
I have gone over these old workings a few times now with different size coils. Both DD's & mono's & I am sure there are no bigger bits on offer for me. I found the bigger bits on my first couple of days & found no bigger bits after going back over the same old ground. Just the smaller bits with a lot of focus, concerntration & guess work as to a target signal or ground noise. Most small bits were with the 10" X 5" mono & 8" mono coils & rubbing them on the ground.
Take care & happy hunting.

JW 

Yes JW,  You can spend (waste) a lot of time on the really small stuff and while it is always nice to find any gold at all, it does get very frustrating finding tiny bits all the time. I get disgusted when I have a very loud signal and I think that it HAS to be at least 4-5 grams and it is 1/2 gram when it finally comes out of the dirt.
Such is life. HH
The Cat

Went to a new spot today & found 4 little bits for a total of only .65 grams. Suppose it is better than nothing & shows there is a bit to be found at this new spot. Awoke this morning to snow on the ground & snowing hard out. BUGGER I thought. Actually I said something else that I cant really repeat on here.
By 10am it had backed off & patchs of blue sky were showing & the forecast was for improving weather. So I headed off for the 1 hour drive to this spot. It was down country a bit from Queenstown & so hadnt quite had the snow as low as we had it. I was fearing the spot would be under snow as it was up on a mountain side, but it wasnt so that was good.
I came across 3 quartz reefs running parallel to each other but in different gullies, but they showed no gold in them or their float. So the gold I found hadnt come from them as the gold was further up the side of the mountain & very flat & water worn but were nowhere near a river or water course. Glacial???

Happy hunting

JW 

Glad to hear that you are enjoying paradise in our area (Cromwell basin) I've lived here for years but only been MDing for a year or so. I've hooked up with a mate who knows the area like the back of his hand and we spend heaps of weekends out fossicking - Quartz Reef being one of these, just amazes me that people keep going back time & time and still come out with worthwhile hauls.

It must be remembered that just about all land in the Basin is privately owned including the Quartz Reef area (Northburn Station) and permission must be gained to access these areas. The owner of Northburn is a very nice guy and usually has no problem in letting people on to detect. However he is getting concerned regarding the increase of people not asking permission. Digging has been noticed around some of the old miners camps which is illegal (as well as even moving tailings) under the Conservation Act. I would really hate to see access limited to a few.

We are lucky here in that we know all the runholders on a personal basis and access for us will be OK but I would hate to see others not given the chance to try their luck.

Keep up the work and never know, we may meet up out there one day.

Hi there Peejay, No it wasnt at QRP that I detected. My wife & I just went there to view the tailings & then went back to QT via Wanaka, Cadrona valley & the Crown Range road. The highest tarsealed highway in NZ. We couldnt muck around as we had no chains & had to beat the late arvo freeze.
  Yes I love Central Otago & it is a paradise.
What detector are you running??
I sent you an email & havnt heard from you & wondered if you received it?? Maybe we could hook up for an outing.

Happy hunting

JW 

Wildcat and others--love this thread!! Well done.

All the best,

Lanny

Good to have you back Lanny. I wondered where you had gone.  I myself haven't been out lately except down in my own bush block. I found a penny or two and some brass relics. Also around a dozen exploded .303 shells.  There used to be some loggers here once so I guess they camped. I wouldn't have liked to be around those shells when they were exploding. Might put a piccy up later.

The Cat

Wildcat--the 303 is a right venerable old rifle--there's still all kinds of them in use around the world. You're right when you say you wouldn't want to be around when those bad-boys were cooking off--flying lead isn't my favorite either.

Got some nice flake gold sluicing--right around 4 grams, but I'm itching to get after the big stuff. It's been too long since I've gone eye to eye with a fat, sassy nugget!

All the best,

Lanny

I see you are using a Garrett? Gravity trap gold pan in your avatar Lanny.  I had a large one and a small one. Lifetime guarrantee they said.  When it was about 4 years old I dropped it accidentally and it split straight in half!  No-one would replace it back then.  I still have the small one. It worked well with the black sand and gold on NZs West Coast. I have att. the Piccy of the shells and the 1924 penny.

The Cat

JW, I reckon it might be a good idea to have a NZ detectorists get-together. Pick an area, get permission from the owner and/or claim holder, and have a weekend out detecting.  Saves flying to OZ too
Probably be best for the summer......

Wow--those shells really cooked off didn't they! That's crazy. Nice find on the penny.

The pan in the pic is a Keene Superpan--a tougher, much more flexible plastic. I haven't split one yet, although most plastic pans will crack if you've got them loaded with river-run and you set them down quickly on an angular rock! I've done that before and it's always a sick feeling when you hear that bottom snap.

Once, way up north of here in the Omineca gold field, a Cheechacko visiting our gold camp had a pan loaded with gravel while he was sampling the face of a wall in an open-pit placer operation, and a rock came ripping down the face, hit the pan, and broke the bottom out!! He was sure lucky that day that the rock didn't hit him in the head.

All the best,

Lanny

Hi Guys, Welcome back Lanny. It has been a long time between drinks. What you been up to??
 Goldtimer....I may not be here in the summer......heading back up home about october. I will send you a PM tomorrow. I would like to catch up with you. Must get off to bed. I have a day back up in these workings tomorrow. We have had a couple of scortcher days 11--12 degrees. Bit of a change from minus 5-6 degree frosts & highs of 2-3. The snow up in the old workings has melted back a bit so I will go up for a look. May be the last time I go up there. I think I have got all I can from them.
  Wildcat....The Garrett super sluice gold pan is my favourite.







Happy hunting

JW 

Nice pictures JW--I'm glad you got out in that 11-12 degree scorcher and got some sluicing done. What kind of a pump are you using to run your high-banker, and what size of hose is your output? That's a nice looking little rig you've got there--did you fabricate it yourself? That Garret Super Sluice looks like it has a nice, wide flat bottom--I've never used one. What do you like about it?

Well, nice to hear from you again.

All the best,

Lanny

Hi there Lanny, The pic of me running the little highbanker/banjo was from a couple of years ago & is in the river directly below where I have been detecting these old sluiced workings which are much higher up on an uplifted terrace. As the crow flies they are about a mile apart but the high terrace up about another 500-600 feet. The motor is a 5 horse honda coupled to a purpose built dredging pump. There is no makers name on the pump but it is 2" in & 1.5" out. It came on a 3" dredge I bought that I have made in to a 4" dredge. I dont normaly use this motor & pump to run the highbanker/banjo as it is an over kill & heavier to carry but I was able to drive right to this spot & wanted teh hose attachment coming off the pump to wash down the exsposed schist that is abobe the normal river flow. I actualy took the 2" suction hose off the end of the 2" nozzle & used the water pressure from the pressure hose to blast the schist. Bit like a mini hydrolic monitor. I would then just use the hose to help wash material into a hole & to give the nozzle some water to suck up to help clean out the hole that I had washed the blasted material into. Worked bloody well.

Result was 16 grams for a coupke of hours

Hi guys, Well I took this mate of mine up to these sluiced workings that I have been detecting in. We couldnt have had a more perfect day except for the lack of gold. I think some bugger had all but cleaned it up.
Prior to getting up there I took Gavin into the Gold Shop in Arrowtown to show him what he needed to keep his eyes open for. Jim the manager of the shop went out the back & came back with a 23 ounce nugget that he dropped into our hands. WOW.... it was found on the west coast a couple of years ago by a detectorist.



Gavin was down to a "T" shirt in the snow detecting. Bloody poms, I dont know?? LOL






He managed to find a good haul of.303 & .22 shells along with bullet heads & other asorted junk. I too found my share of rubbish & thought I was going to get skunked. It would have been my first day that I hadnt found anything. It was well after we had stopped for lunch that I got the faintest of signals that could have been anything but a signal. But after scrapping away an inch or two of soil it got a lot more positive. Then I hit the schist & it was still there so I was 100% sure it was gold. I looked up for Gavin to see if he was close bye so I could get him to sweep it with his Fisher C Scope & see if he could pick it up. He was no where to be seen. He had gone off to find a spot that hopefully for him I hadnt been. I waited a bit but he was still not in sight so I kept digging. It was a bit elusive to find but I finaly had it in my hand. Not a minute later Gavin turned up. I poped it on a rock for him & he was able to get a signal at about 3-4 inches. It turned out to be a .46 gram piece & the only piece for the day.
I think Gavin had a good time despite not finding a bit of gold & I am sure he learnt a thing or two & what to look out for in the old workings.
 I wont be back to these old workings again. I have photo's & the memories of some great weekends up there.
I awoke this morning to another postcard perfect day when I opened up the curtains.





Headed off to a new spot not knowing what I may or may not find. Went to some more old ground sluicings & targeted the exposed bed rock. Ended up with 12 bits. The biggest was 1.21 grams & the smallest .11 for a total of just under 5 grams.

The piece by itself is the bit I found yesterday with Gavin



Happy hunting

JW 

I look forward to late Sunday evenings because I wait to see what you got for the weekend!
Well done JW
I know my Bro spent a lot of time around Lake Hayes Building many years ago. It is a beautiful place. Driven past there many a time myself.

The Cat

To the Cat--this thread never disappoints; neither do the pictures disappoint!

To JW--nice finds--I'm glad the Oldtimer's left you some. Depending on rain, ground moisture, atmospheric conditions, a newer more sensitive coil etc., your old worked out patch may yet produce more gold.

All the  best to both of you,

Lanny

Hi Guys, Since taking my friend up to the old sluiced workings I have been to a new spot that I have been told has been pretty hammered by detectorists over the years. I found 12 pieces on my first day for a total of 4.96 grams. Smallest was .11 of a gram found with the minelab 8" commandar mono & the biggest 1.21 found with the coiltek 10" X 5" joey mono. The area is old ground sluiced workings down to schist bedrock. The gold being found in the folds of the schist that is standing up on edge & also under the schist layers that are laying horozontal. The old timers I guess just got the gold that their water would wash through their tail races & sluice box channels. These are still very easy to see & often lined on the sides by rocks stacked up on there edges to form a "U" channel to direct the water flow & material down them. Over a few days I have found 27 pieces for a total so far of 8.5 grams.



 The smallest .08 of a gram. Most have been found with the joey coil & all in soil/sensitive & boost/deep modes. Deadly on the tiny gold in this shallow bedrock. I would say the detectorisists before me have found anything of size & I am getting the rats & mice. I have yet to try a larger coil than the !0" X 5" but will try the 11" mono on the fringes of the bedrock where it drops off into a bit more depth. Will also try the mini UFO & the UFO coils. There are some powerlines going over parts of very shallow bedrock where the mono's are a bit noisy so may try my 11" DD.

Happy hunting

JW   

You are making me jealous JW...  I have been informed that the new Whites TDI Pro has arrived in Aussie, however the battery packs are arriving on a later flight. Must get my gold sold so I can get one...

The Cat

JW--you little detecting devil you--well done--and in a worked out patch to boot. You're doing great--keep it going and then post the pictures of the big stuff you sniff out.

All the best,

Lanny

Hi guys, I have been a bit quiet on the posting front lately but have still been getting bits of gold on each visit to these sluiced workings. All be it quite small & on occasions only one or two pieces. My last full day there had me only get two .11 gram bits. One was in some old workings further up stream that had some good exposed bed rock but it looked like it may have had some modern day activity with possibly a trommel plant & excavator doing some work over the old workings. I was supprised I didnt do better there. I was about to give it away when I got a .11 gram bit with the 10" X 5" mono. I then went back to the workings where I have been doing quite well to a spot where I had got a few bits where a road in has crossed some bedrock. I put on my new 6" round coiltek mono to see if it could sniff out something more than my 10" X 5" had got. I had been over the ground very slowly & very thouroughly with the !0" X 5" a couple of times & had got a couple of bits more on a previous visit. My first signal with the new 6" mono was a .11 gram bit. It was dark by this stage so I packed it in for the day. Boy what a long day for a total of .22 grams. I would have walked miles backwards & forwards over the workings. Through briar rose, broom & gorse.
 The weekend before I had crashed through some briar rose, tearing up my old jacket in the process, under some powerlines, which made the mono a tad noisey, when I spied some good looking bed rock up on a small slope that I hadnt noticed before. Damn the powerlines . They where above some stacked tailings & looked as though they may have been washed down with the ground sluicing in the old days, but there was no tailings on them but some small tail races either side. So my thoughts were that they must have been pretty exposed in the first place. It was the usual schist up on edge but very smooth & rounded off by glacial grinding.
Here is a pic of the slope looking up hill.



Within a minute I had my first signal that had that lovely mellow gold sound. I scraped away a couple of inches of the topsoil, checked the signal & it was still there. Another scrape & I was on to the schist bed rock. Another check of the signal & it was gone. Bugger, I thought. That isnt a good sign. Scanned the pile & the signal was there. Not giving it much hope now of being gold but more likely a bit of lead. Too my suprise it was a piece of gold. You beauty. Must have been sitting right on top of the schist. I got 6 pieces off that slope when darkness set in. I didnt take my head lamp with me so had to bale before it got too dark to find my way back through all the briar rose, damn the old miners for planting that stuff. They planted it to use the hose hip to make tea as a source of vitamin C. Now the bloody thing is growing wild & taking over the land scape & invading the valleys & mountain sides. A real pest now. HORRIBLE STUFF.
Looking down the slope with a dig hole & detector showing another find. Notice the powerlines & briar rose bushes.



Notice the shallow topsoil down to the schist bedrock, About 2"




And another piece down into the folds of schist. The broken out schist to the left.



Piece of gold on the white lid of my gold bottle



River way down below & the exposed high bank on the other side cut down into the glacial material. Notice the powerlines & briar rose, GRRRRR



Some of the pieces I found before dark on this slope.



I went back during the week after work & found 12 bits all up off this slope using the 10" X 5" mono I havnt tried the 6" mono but had a go with an 11" DD in mono mode to combat the powerlines. Got nothing further off that slope but on my way back to my wagon snagged a .7 gram piece on some bedrock exposed by a 4 wheel drive road that also gave a heap of crap targets & .22 shells.

Total finds from these working since my last photos. 32 bits. I think I have now done my dash at this spot & will have to find another.



Found 20 grams all up. Not bad for a spot that has been trashed in the past & also by a GPX 4000 that I know of.

Happy hunting

JW 

As they say in this part of the world JW,  You da man!!  Congratulations once again. Will catch up when I get time. Too many docs and specialists at present.

The Cat

G'day Wildcat, Sorry to hear of the Doc's & specialists. Hope all is well.
I am looking at getting back to Poolburn this month. I have got myself an 18" mono & I am looking at a 20" nugget finder mono. The country there is ideal for these bigger coils. The weather has taken an unusual turn & heated up a bit. Not normal for this time of the year, as you will know. I am sure it will turn to crap again any day. We have only had two falls of snow in the Queenstown & Arrowtown areas. That is unusual as well. I am sure that will change too before winter is over.
I went back tonight after work to the sluiced workings armed with a saw to cut back the briar rose to get at some more bedrock. Didnt find anything. That dented my pride as I had been getting bits of gold every time. Oh well, I knew it couldnt last. Two targets had me very confident they were gold. Both were down into the schist a good 4". One was a boot tack & the other a piece of wire. BUGGER. Makes you wonder how they got so far down.

Take care & I hope all works out well for you.

Regards

John

Hi all, great reading on this site, specially this thread. I'm an older miner / detectorist coming back to have another crack at it. Awesome to see the NZ content and hear of recent finds. Keep posting guys it makes my day and enthuses me to get out bipping again.

Wecome nuggy,  Hope you enjoy the site as much as we do. What part of the country are you from?

The Cat

Hi there Cat, I'm near Greymouth on the west coast, but am wishing I was in Queensland like you cos it's still cold as here.

Spent an hour searching for my 4 inch dredge nozzle today, pretty sure it's in that garage somewhere. The weather seems to be getting warmer, though that might be wishful thinking. The motor and pump look ok. Need new pack straps for my carry frame. Got my wetsuit that I haven't worn for ten years and ten kilos, might still fit  ?
Got to get a crevice sucker (cheers JW), a big gad (thanks Lanny) might even take a trip to central, (good one Wildcat).
 My new detector coil is on it's way from the states. Reading all the posts from you guys has helped with tips and attitude adjustment - about a month more preparation and I will be good to go, should be a great summer. Thanks guys!

Hi Nuggy, good to hear you are prepping and psyching yourself up.  I went through Greymouth once, at least I think it was....  lol
I used to have a b in law that owned the Whataroa hotel for many years and have been fishing on a few of the lakes up that way. Beautiful landlocked salmon.  Happy hunting.

The Cat

Hi there Nuggy, Welcome to the forum. What detector are you getting??
 I went back to my thrashed sluiced workings a few weeks ago as the weather here has warmed up & the snow & permafrost gone from them. I headed up there on friday after work for a few hours before dark. I put on my little 6" round mono & decided I would clean off some of the rocks that the old timers had stacked on top of the bedrock that they had exposed & cleaned up with their ground sluicing. I had found a few nuggets in what bed rock they had left exposed & hadnt covered with tailing rocks. I was gambling that there may be more gold buried in the schist crevices that their water hadnt washed down into or broken away & was still trapped in there.
I was rewarded with 3 little nuggets for my effort.

I picked in to the solid schist just above a little crevice. I got a signal there & at first thought it was in the little crevice but it was up above the crevice. I thought the crevice might be going in on an angle but the the signal was above the crevice. The schist was very hard & sparks were flying. I started to think it was probably just a layer of iron stone or iron sand in the schist itself. I was down about 3" & it was hard going. I thought about coming back to it at a later day with a cold chisel, it was that hard. But I kept at it & was finally rewarded with a piece of gold. I was really supprised that it was gold in that part of the schist & not in a crevice.

Close up of the hole.



I then got two more pieces in the bigger crevice to the left in the pic below. They were in the bottom of the crevice itself.

This photo was taken on sunday when I went back & pulled more rocks down. I had the joey coil on this day as I planned to go to what I thought were some more old workings further along the mountain side. Well I thought they looked like old workings from a google earth view. There was only one way to find out.....right.
Well the joey coil found me another piece on sunday in the crevice to the right.





On the friday after finding the 3 little pieces I headed to some soft rotten schist that I had got 5 pieces from at an earlier time. I hadnt got a signal but had just dug into the scgist because it was easy digging & got the 5 bits. Well because of my success with pulling down the rock pile I though I would just hack into this soft schist further & expose more of the crevice. I was rewarded with 3 more little bits for my effort.

This is the crevice in the soft schist



The gold was in the bottom of this crevice.



It was getting dark so I needed to get out of there as I didnt have my head lamp.

On sunday after finding that piece back at the spot with the joey coil where I pulled down the rocks I then headed off to check out what I thought was more old workings. Turned out they were but there wasnt very much exposed bed rock. But what bed rock there was I managed to find 8 pieces. The biggest was .98 of a gram & the smallest .05 of a gram. That is the smallest piece I have found with my detector to date.



The 4 small pieces were all found in the same hole. I only got the one signal to start with but when I got that piece out I checked the hole & there were no other signals. But going by my exprience of the last days detecting I just decided to keep on digging into the soft schist & bingo ended up getting 3 more bits out of the same hole by just keeping on hacking into it. So lesson learnt........Dont stop digging in a spot that you get a piece of gold from just because you are getting no further signals . They may be only just out of range until you dig a bit more.

Happy hunting

JW  

JW your superb photos tell it all. What an excellent gold trap that rock is. There is no stopping you mate. Congratulations

The Cat

Hi JW, great photos, some dogged persistence showing there and paying off too! Nice looking pieces.
I have a Bounty Hunter tracker 4 detector (because it was real cheap) and got (3 days ago) a 4 inch coil from ebay for it. The budget won't run to a Minelab or even an MXT at the moment unfortunately .
I don't consider it a serious detector, but it will find an under one gram piece at 2 inches with the new coil in an air test. only the back half of the coil reads the tiny bits, so I will have to overlap sweeps and walk real slow.
I am pretty busy with work, and projects I'm constructing, but get the detecting bug every now and then. I plan to take the detector out crevice hunting to work areas of exposed bedrock in creek beds.
I had a gold bug 2 a few years back that was good at this, but bottom here can vary a lot, three total changes in one meter is not unusual, and the constant ground balancing to get good sensitivity drove me nuts. I used it in Aussie as well, I think it might have caused my tinnitus from it's reaction to them brown hot rocks!  LOL 
My 4 inch dredge is almost ready to go just need to cut some spaghetti matting and expanded mesh for the box.
Keep it coming guys, I'm having some connection problems lately so I don't get on net every day. Nuggy

Hi there Wildcat & Nuggy. Thanks for the comments.
I dont know if I have the Mida's touch or what but I just dont seem to be able to miss out on finding gold. I usually go to areas where gold has been found before which is usually a save bet to finding something. Even if it is only a bit of colour. But lately I have gone to areas that arent that well known or not a lot of gold has been found at them. During the last week I went for a bit of a walk to just check out a hunch. It was quite a long walk but I was rewarded. Not a lot but 3 grams. The buzz was that it wasnt a known area for gold so that made it all the sweeter.



Went for another walk on saturday & only got in 2 hours actual detecting. I was using my favourite little joey mono & got 5.99 grams. They were all pretty shallow & found way up on a mountain side.
Here is a view not far from where I went.



Well today sunday I went for a bit more of a walk & got in 4 hours detecting but I struck the jackpot. Total for sunday 26.11 grams. I was using the 24" X 12" UFO mono & it just proves it can find small gold as well & larger bits. Here are three I got all pretty close to each other. The big one is 13.85 grams.










I think I will have to call in sick for work  & head back there & see what else I can get. Best money I have made for a couple of days (work).

Happy hunting

JW 





 

Great stuff  JW.....

Watch your tail JW...  lol,  I had blokes that used to follow me around once. They eventually found me but I had pretty much cleaned out the area by then.  That is real nice gold JW.   

The Cat

Great stuff JW. I met a guy who was on strike from the freezing works, so decided to go do some dredging. He got 16 ounces for a week or so dredging. Then he went back to try get some more and it turned out that it was all cleaned up. You don't want to throw in that job too soon!
Very nice gold
Cheers
GT

G'day Cat & GT, Yes it blew me away. All very shallow. The big sucker wasnt more than 1.5". Screamed like a .22 shell but I dug it any way. What a suprise I got when 2 scapes & it was out. I was expecting a .22 shell or a .303, but fell over when I cleaned the dirt off the piece of "crap" that was sitting in my hand & screaming at me.
Went to some old workings today that have been thrashed by every man & his dog. Met a guy there, first time ever I have come across some one else, who was detecting there with a GPX 4500. He was using a 14" nugget finder elliptical mono. Not sure how long he had been there. He probably told me but I cant remember. He took a guess who I was & got it right. MMMmmm guess he has seen my posts & also being in Queenstown....... He hadnt got anything. I wasnt holding much hope myself as I have thrashed the place myself but to date have got over one ounce there. That suprised him as the place has seen probably every gold machine out there over the years.
I decided to look in places that I hadnt given much thought to & went real slow with my little favourite joey mono. Places like the side walls & edges of the old tailing races. Well one as it turned out. I didnt get there until about 4pm. He was just leaving as the weather looked a bit dodgy & it started to rain a bit. I had a plastic bag over my control box so wasnt too worried. After we had a bit of a chat the rain stopped & it looked a bit brighter so he decided to stay a bit longer. I had just got my first signal when he walked up to me. When I got back in to it it just turned out to be a bit of crap. He went off a couple of tailing races away & I headed to the edge of one. My next 4 targets were all bits off gold. It was probably about 1.5 hours later & he decided to head off.
I asked how he did & he had nothing. He was suprised when I showed him my 4 as he had scanned that area when he first walked in. We said our goodbyes & then I got 3 more bits right where I was standing when he walked off.
I was right in the zone....I dont know what it is......Mentaly ground balanced or what But I was just getting piece after piece with no junk targets. Just on dark I got another one & didnt have my head lamp with me. I had left it on the bloody roof of my wagon It was right in the hard schist & not in a crevice & right on the top lip edge of a tailing race that was a good 10 foot drop into the bottom  which was full of briar rose. SHYT BAGS....what do I do?? Keep at it & risk it going off the edge & down in to the briar rose bushs & lost for ever or wait until another day......NA go for it.......All went well be it dark by the time I got it out. All up I got 13 pieces for a total of just over 4 grams. Just when you think a place has given all its going to.....13 pieces for the GP 3000 & nothing for the GPX 4500  



Happy hunting

JW  

The Midas touch or whatever is definitely working for you JW, great stuff. Your mention of the chap with the 4500 proves the saying "it's not the detector that matters it's the operator". Good on ya mate, keep at it while you're going good and staying in the zone, long may it last for you. Nuggy

Hi All,  JW i had to come online to say your posts and piks are very good,  Theres only on problem, some of the places you are going you havnt asked for permission from the landholder or claim holder, you have been warned already to stay off one area, but you keep going back, have respect please, as your actions have now started a campain by land/claim holders to deny permission for the rest of us, so please ask permission, and if you dont, then dont show the piks on the web, your only digging a very deep hole for yourself and ruining it for everyone else. 

You have brought up a good point there NZ - 99% of land in Central Otago is privately owned and permission to detect must be sought from the landowner/leassee. I would never dream of going onto someone else's property without their OK.

I live in Cromwell and get on very well with the runholders (a couple are distant rellies). This year there seems to be a growing dislike to fossickers, one even took me and showed me some quite deep holes dug on his land by someone with a detector, his concerns are that the strong hot winds that are due in a couple of months will scour out the loose dirt and leave even larger holes, and that grass is very hard to grow here and digging it up is against their way. If we do dig we make sure that the turf is replaced and tramped down.

I think these deep holes are a downside of some detectors(I suggest Minelabs) being too good and locating far deeper than what we are used too. My Goldbug and GMT really only locate a few inches unless the nugget is quite sizable. i only carry a small grubber and trowel, some guys now are carting full size shovels and picks and digging holes of a size that are really upsetting the landowners.

One runholder has told me if this continues without permission on his property he will slash tires on vehicles involved!

For our hobbies sake we must continue to work with the landowners and leave their property exactly, if not better than we found it. I would hate to think that they would consider refusing us onto their properties.

Hi there, MMMMmmmmm I had been on one property that I thought was crown land but the manager of the property informed me that it was private property. QT area. I have respected that & I havnt & wont be back. Is this the one you are refering to as you mention more than one?? It doesnt have a claim on it. The other 2 properties I have been on I do have both the owners permission & have been invited back when ever I like as long as I let them know I am going to be on there. I have even been given the use of a hut on site for over night stays.
I back fill ALL my holes, & others that I see left open. No matter how big or small & mine arent all that big in the first place. Deepest would be 12" & I dont use a shovel.
Thank you for your positive comment about my pics & posts. This is something I am very passionate about & I dont make a habbit of treading on peoples toes

JW

Hi all, What I know of JW is that he is very particular regarding permissions as we have discussed in emails between ourselves. If I did not think this I would not have suggested some areas to him. He is always very open about what he has done, and this certainly does not show him to be unethical. In fact, friends like JW are very hard to find nowadays, especially where gold is involved.
However there are others that read these threads and sneak around and do not participate in the forum at all, but use it for their own gains.
Maybe we (meaning myself included) should not be so open on these forums as this certainly seems to encourage 'others' to flock to these places.
Lesson learned.

Happy hunting to those who retain their ethics...

The Cat

To JW and The Cat--love this thread! Great pictures and stories. I only wish I didn't live a world away--I'd head for the hills with either of you in a heartbeat. I'll have to add some stuff to my thread as soon as I can this next month.

All the best,

Lanny

Hi J W, how is all the wild weather treating you, is your roof holding ok? I bet you will have had more snow.
We have had ten days of bad weather, wild westerlies, hail and a ridiculous amount of rain up here.
Can't go whitebaiting or even creviceing, rivers are all way up and dirty. Trying to think on bright side about some of my old favourite crevices getting restocked, but patience is hard to come by. Got both the gold fever and cabin fever burnin away at me. Wasn't for this site I'd be in a bad way.
Don't let the nay sayers stop you posting. Tall poppy syndrome I reckon (jealousy). Or they worried your posts will attract other detectorists into the area.
May your earphones sing your favourite tones all summer long...... Nuggy

Hi Nuggy,  One of our online buddies was going to go up there hunting this last weekend. Hope he didn't get snowed in as they copped 6" of snow down south. My Grand daughter has just gone to Invercargill for a holiday for 3 weeks and has never seen snow. She is 17. It will be a real experience for her. Apparently they were lucky to make it back from the airport.
Anyway, why would you bother with whitebaiting? Those little eyes scare me off....   Methinks it will be a good season for the dredges in NZ this summer. Meantime, there is plenty of time for ideas  and reading   Oh, and a good hot cuppa 
Cheers

The Cat

The Roof of stadium Southland collapsed down this way with the snow on it. Yep, you guessed it, flat roof 
When will those architects learn?
The snow will stuff things up for dredging for a while to come. Oh well, like nuggy said, at least some new gold might get washed out of the tailings in them thar hills.
Cheers

Hi Guys, Nuggy, Wildcat, Lanny, Thanks guys for your support & comments. Much appreciated.
 We didnt get the snow in Queenstown like they did down in Southland. A few snow flurries & that is all. Nothing that settled on the ground. Bugger, as it is lambing time & 10's of thousands have perished.
As you would have noticed I have been making a pig of myself with my detecting. There is good reason for that. I live up in the Coromandal in the North Island of New Zealand where the gold is hard rock & not of the alluvial type, as it is down here in Central Otago. I am heading back up home at the end of this month & my detecting will be over so I have made the most of my time down here. This next weekend will be my last. My plan is to sell up home & move on down here to live. Goldtimer & I may be hooking up for a detect this weekend if it works out for both of us. Been nice to meet him & his son & I wish them well this dredging season with their new claim. I wont say where it is
 Went out last night after work in to the old sluiced workings where I got those 13 bits the other week. Well bugger me I got 4 bits in the one crevice which was along a bit in the same run of crevice where I got 3 bits last time. I did scan that spot before but got no signal. Same joey coil although the ground was a bit damper this time & I think that was the difference. The ground being a bit more conductive. Got 5 bits all up for a total of 1.35 grams. Biggest was .75 of a gram.
 Here are some pics of gold found last week using a combination of coils over the same patch of open ground. Coils used in order of photo's
This lot was found using the 24" X 12" UFO mono. Biggest was 2.17 grams & the smallest for this big coil was only .17 of a gram



Three of these next lot were found with the coiltek 18" round mono. They were found one after the other in the same line as I walked along. Biggest only .94 of a gram.



 The other 5 where found with the joey mono including the one top right with the quartz still attached to it. I didnt use the joey over the same patch but amongst bed rock in the sluicings



I then put on the 11" mono coil & went over the same patch again & got 2 more bits. A 1.10 gram bit that was down about 8" & a .51 gram bit. I then got 4 other bits all less than .5 of a gram each out in open country that were just random. Funny thing was that two were close to each other. So I stuck sticks in the ground where they were & tried to see if there was a pattern. There wasnt. Then I got the other 2 in a very similar way & again put sticks in the ground but again there were no more & no pattern. I then pit back on the joey mono & got 6 pieces in the old workings.



Here I detected just below a dam that the old timers built to block up a gully & use the water for their sluicing. I saw a small patch of bed rock & thinking there wouldnt be any gold in it as it must have been gone over by every body who has detected here.



But I headed on down & checked it out any way. Detector sitting on the bed rock.



Well I got a faint signal.....& blow me down......it was a piece of gold sitting only half an inch down on the bed rock. One scrape & it was out. Thinking there was no way it was going to be gold. But it was.



Total of 13.79 grams. I gave the Land owner & couple of nuggets to thank him for allowing me to detect there. He wouldnt take them as he saw how hard I had worked for it. But I insisted & I think he was quite tickled & needless to say I am welcome back any time. 

Happy hunting

JW 

Again great stuff J W, nice looking nuggets too. How did you go over the weekend?
Just got back from Christchurch, moving the sister in law from her earthquake damaged house. Got a couple of days of sunshine there, and when I got back here the wind had eased off and today we only have showers forecast.
Good luck with selling up north. Nuggy

Don't let the nay sayers stop you posting. Tall poppy syndrome I reckon (jealousy). Or they worried your posts will attract other detectorists into the area.
May your earphones sing your favourite tones all summer long...... Nuggy

No, never call me a nay sayer Nuggy-I've done plenty of promoting my hobby in the last 15 or so years that I've been detecting, I don't know JW but he sounds a genuine guy I was just expressing a very important point to him. In Central Otago we support the Landowners who in return allow us use of their land - there's no six gun rules here mate. I have introduced many people to detecting, I've even, and quite often, taken people (even American visitors to NZ) in my company's chopper (I am a pilot) to some of my most favoured detecting back country spots for absolutely no reward so never accuse me of striking down a tall poppy.

However, I have NEVER EVER entered anyones property without their express permission and all I'm asking is for others to do the same and you accuse me of negativity. I think you should have a real good look at yourself.

However, for the next couple of months we give up detecting as most farms are lambing and calving and the last thing wanted is people disturbing the stock.

No use anyone replying to this as I'm signing out from this forum for good.

Good luck and I hope to meet you out in the blocks sometime JW.

Sooooo Retyred, I guess that was just a random point that you make to anyone in Central then. Not just successful detector operators on a public forum. And you are off here forever because.......Detecting is your hobby and passion for fifteen years?........... it's the only point you wish to express or read?............. no-one here could possibly say anything you don't already know?........ or??
If you don't want to be thought of as negative - be positive, too easy. Use friendly encouraging words, without accusations!
Seems a little strange that for two months you can't detect anywhere in the whole province for fear of disturbing stock? Land owners can usually direct people to areas away from such sensitive beasts. When I worked on a farm we carried on fencing, grubbing thistles, feeding out and even moved stock with lambs and calves from one paddock to another with dogs. All of these activities I would have thought more disturbing than detecting quietly along. Unless of course you usually arrive in a screaming, dust raising helicopter right in the middle of the lambing paddock! But I guess you'll never read this, yeah right. Nuggy

[Totally inspirational!]

I'm so glad this thread bubbled up. It's been fascinating reading, and the photos are awesome. Totally inspirational! Thanks for keeping it going and for sharing your adventures!

We have been to NZ, South Island and visited some gold areas like Central Otago, Arrow Town, Greytown and Ross. We didn't take our detectors as it was mid winter and too darned cold for swing a coil. I wrote an article on Ross, etc for the Gem and Treasure Magazine not long after our visit. Must have been about 3 years ago.

We must get over there one day and do some swinging. One thing I have learned from this thread is that not all nuggets come from the rivers. Some spots looked very inviting.

Below is our gold from our WA trip this year

NNNNNice gold, plenty of it too. West Australia is the best, hope to get there one day. Nuggy

JW--I love catching up on this thread! You do such a great job with your pictures and your friendly, tag-along narrative style. Excellent thread.

All the best,

Lanny

Hi Guys, How you all been? Its been a while since I have done a post. Guess that is because I dont have a lot to show & tell since being back from the south Island & up home here in the Coromandel.
Granite......I remember that article that you did in the GG&T mag very well as it came just after I had been through the West Coast on my way back to the North Island from one of my stints in Central Otago. Especially in the Ross area where you visited the black beach sand operation of Birchfield mining. They are doing very well with an operation at the south end of Ross as I tap these keys.
 On my way back up from Central Otago this last time I spent a week on the West Coast fossicking in different places. Called in to the Callery River which is a river that flows into the main river that drains from the Franz Joseph Glacier.

Franz Joseph Glacier



The Callery was quite rich in gold in the early days although a very difficult river to access & was done in the winter when frozen. I only spent a few hours there as it is quite a walk in there. I didnt really hold much hope of finding any thing. But I spyed a good looking crevice that was a way above the normal river flow & thought, what the heck. So with my crevicing tools I scraped out a pan full of material & went down to the freezing glacial melt water to pan it out. Bugger me, some nice bits of colour. I went back & got another pan full of material. This time I was down to a puggy blue clay & thought this should be good. As it looked to be virgin material & I doubted that it had been cleaned out before. Unfortuantly I was down to the hilt in to the crevice with my crevicing tools & could get no deeper. I got some nice pieces out of it & as it was not long before dark & I didnt have my head lamp & I had a bit of a walk ahead of me. So I headed on out. One more spot that I will have to get back to.

Gold found



My next spot was Moonlight Creek/Gully. A place I have been trying to get to in earlier times but the first two I was foiled by the weather. The 3rd time I was almost in there when I came across a big tree across the track & I had no chain saw & no way of moving it. This time I got in & had two days of brilliant weather. The first day it was early afternoon when I got in there & not knowing the area I had a bit of a walk around off the main tracks amongst the old workings & old water races. Sussed out the creek & looked for shallow exposed bed rock areas to have a go with the detector.

This is a picnic spot at the turn off from the main road & on up the Moonlight



And this is right in at the end of the driveable road to the start of the Moonlight track itself



I ended up with 6.5 grams of gold using the little joey coil & the 12" X 7" nuggetfinder advantage mono.



Also found was this beautiful 6 gram speci



Well that was it for the South Island. Since being back up home I have only been out for two weekends with my 4" dredge up a Coromandel creek. Ended up with 18 grams of pretty piss week gold compared to the gold down south. Very high silver content but some nice specimen pieces amongst it. One was even found with the detector. The bigger brown piece on the right. My first detected gold from the Coromandel.



Here is some close ups of it





And some others











Well this year has really flowen buy & it is just around the corner to xmas. Bloodey hell....where did this year go??
MERRY XMAS EVERY BODY & a prosperous new year. May your pokes be full of the yellow.

Happy hunting

Regards

JW

JW--great pictures and nice write-ups. My, but you've been a busy little nugget-shooter/dredger. Well done. It's always so great cruising though your pictures and your travelogues--gives me a well-needed fix!!

All the best,

Lanny

Hi J W, Wildcat, Lanny and all, Well you were right at my back door on the coast here J W, on the way from the glaciers to Greymouth you actually have to drive past my house!
Moonlight is an old stamping ground of mine and it has been a rich area, consistently yielding gold despite having had a lot of attention from miners - fossickers  for many years. To get any results in there you either get lucky after a flood, or you really know what you're doing. I know from your posts you fit in the 2nd category. Nuggy
PS DOC pulled out the bridge about a week ago I'm told, so you can add about a 5 k walk to get to the start of that walk track you drove to, nice of them aye!

Have to mention the Pike River miners on here at some time. This being the unofficial Kiwi thread cops it. As the News went around the world of 29 of our men caught underground in a coal mine here, you will have heard about it. J W was fairly close by at Moonlight River.
This disaster has cast a gloom over over our town, and the suffering of families going into the festive season with this still so fresh in their minds cannot be comprehended.
I knew one of the guys very well, he was a carpenter doing contract work underground. A hell of a good guy, he worked with me on a couple of jobs. "Rolls" was a great guy to work with and a good mate. I and many others will miss him.
I know 3 others who have lost sons. Anyone with children can only sympathize totally with what they must be feeling. I won't go on about it or raise it elsewhere but it has to be at least mentioned as we are all talking mining, and it is never far from my mind these days though it is hard to talk about it. Thanks for reading this, Nuggy.

Been quiet lately ay?  good to see things happening. Been going to email you JW but haven't got any news re house as yet. Man, that is --deleted--ty looking gold up there!!  lol  (You know what I mean)  Only been coin bopping lately but hoping to get out again very soon.  I gave my daughter one of my detectors as she is ultra keen on it and we and one of my grandkids are going to hit the bush soon.
Will keep in touch
Wildcat

(Panther on other forums)

Wildcat, AKA The Cat--nice to see you back. Glad your daughter is ready to head out detecting, and you out chasing coins can sometimes be not a bad way to burn up the time as you wait to hit the goldfields.

All the best, and thanks for your hello on the AZ Outback!!

Lanny

Update; Moonlight bridge. For Kiwi JW. . . . Apparently, ( I haven't been up for a look myself) DOC have removed the wooden deck from the bridge due, they say, to it being unsafe to drive over? It was ok last year when I went up for a look.
There were, 15 or so years back, several batches up there that belonged to locals. Doc pushed hard for these to be removed, even though they were allowed to stay, from historic use rules, in force when DOC took over the land. Over a very short amount of time most of these burned down under suspicious circumstances. Now I believe only one still stands.

If DOC are unable to maintain these few bridges, they should all be sacked, and a crew that can do the job taken on. They charge mining permit holders to use these roads / bridges, then divert the funds to god knows what. Not the local staff's fault I know but the higher ups need a rocket under them. It is a disgrace how this recreational panning area has been treated by DOC. They no longer allow suction claims in this river even though it was the most dredged river here for 30 years. They will never avoid conflict over these policies as there is gold shedding into this river in every flood, and we get plenty of them. The locals have been fossicking there for generations and they just aren't going to stop.

A friend has been driving up to the bridge then cycling to the panning area. He tells me the locals are trying to collect funds to re-deck the bridge themselves so there is a small ray of hope, if DOC will let them do it.

Not sure if I can get my dirt bike over the bridge skeleton or not, but I'm willing use it to help you get up there next time you want to get in if you like. All the best for 2011, Nuggy

Hi Nuggy, Thanks mate for that update on the bridge. I had heard that they had just pulled up the wooden planking from the steel structure with there intension to inspect the steel work for rust. I think I will give DOC in Greymouth a call & get it from the horses mouth as to what they intend to do with it. If they arent going to make it good again then I wonder if it is possible to redirect the road & make a ford crossing over the creek. If enough people get behind a petition or lobby the hell out of the local MP then surely something can be done about it. 5hit its only a poxy bridge. Me think they dont want any one to go in there full stop so the easiest thing for them to do is pull up the bridge. Where there is a will there is a way & people will find a way up there. It is the local fossickers that keep the road clear of tree fall any way & the local fossickers that hassled the hell out of the council to put a grader over the road a wee while ago. Be a damn shame to lose access in to there. I for one cant see it happening....not for long any way.
I went for a dredge back at the spot where I detected the above specimen hoping for more. Took me two hours to get the dredge in place & set up running.







Dredged all day & got 2 grams of shotty Coromandel gold just like the gold in the above post. Before leaving I raked & detected my tailings pile. As the specimen I got the previous time was very rounded & water worn & as there wasnt a lot of weight in gold in it I thought there was every chance that similar pieces could just roll & tumble & dance right down & out of the box & not settle in behind the riffles.
Well my luck was in & I snagged two beaut little speimens. Check these two puppies out.





Here is a few pics of the different sides of one





 



Close up



And the other one



They brought a smile to my dial 

There has to be more of those.

Happy hunting & a prosperous new year to you all

JW 

nice speci ,jw.      keep us posted , fill your poke!   

Yeah the Moonlight Bridge has all of the boarding taken off. Damn DoC, they could replace all the wood in two or three days if they wanted, but they leave it off for the holiday season. At the bridge it's like tent city. About half a dozen people camped there lol

Very nice specimens J W, like spider webs of gold wrapped around the quartz. I have not seen such good ones from NZ before. Had some Reefton ones, but they only showed a speck of gold here and there. I have the December 2010, Aussie Gold Gem and Treasure mag in front of me, the cover shot is a dozen or so really nice Aussie species, yours would not be out of place among them.

Hi Goldtimer, just checked your previous posts, what are you doing up here, poking around our sandfly infested paradise?

 Nuggy

You did well JW. That retirement fund must be looking real good by now.. lol  Love your rig too. At the moment we are flooded in, can't get to the local town or city, let alone gold hunting. My tractor is still bogged down the bush. Been there since before Xmas.  If it stops raining it will take 2-3 weeks to dry out after that. I'm told it could be April.... This is unreal, rain every day and night constant and heavy. They reckon it rained for 40 days and 40 nights with the biblical flood. I reckon we have had more than 50 days so far with hardly a break.  This is at a time of year when we only normally get the odd thunderstorm. WTF is going on?  Can you tell I am pis*ed off?
The Cat

Hi Wildcat, Holeee sh*^% just saw pix of Towoomba and flash flood, man thats pretty bad alright, person caught in wrong spot would have no chance. Hope you and yours are ok. Hang in there, Nuggy

Hi Guys, flood looks pretty bad,  :(hope all you Aussies get through it alright...
Nuggy - I was up the coast on a visiting expedition mainly, caught up with a few family and friends. Unfortunately the weather was pretty unsettled (I was there just after new years) and didn't really get any detecting in. Found a bit of fine stuff with the pan and sluice, but nothing to speak of.....
It was well worth going though, the coast and the people on it are great
Sandflys? The moonlight sandflys look pretty tame when compared to the formidable black monsters at Jackson's bay. Man they're big 

Hi Guys, It has been a wee while since I have had my detector out. In NZ our gold is usually pretty small & we are lucky to have pretty quiet ground. Hence mono coils are my coil of choice & I will only use a DD if working close to powerlines or an electric fence or EMI is making the mono too noisy. Small gold is better than no gold.
I have recently got back from 7 days detecting down in Central Otago. The only DD I took was the standard 11" coil that came with my detector. The rest were all mono's. I am using a bit of an old detector by todays standards. A GP 3000. The mono's I took were coiltek 6", coiltek 10" X 5", nuggetfinder 12" X 7", minelab 11" commander, minelab 15" X 12" commander, coiltek 18" & coiltek 24" X 12" UFO.
I used the nuggetfinder 12" X 7" & the coiltek 6" to go over some shallow ground just above some old workings that I had gone over the last time I was down there. I managed to get 14 bits with the nugget finder on the first day. They were all sub grammers except two. One at 2.55 grams & one at 1.05 grams. they were all very shallow.
The next day I put on the 24" X 12" UFO coil, my patch finder, to cover new ground more quickly & try to hit on to another patch. Only managed a 1.37 gram bit & a .68 after covering quite a big area. Getting a bit frazzled, as it was quite warm at 40 degrees celcius, I went back to the spot I was on the day before & put on the 6" mono. Managed to get 3 more bits. A 1.09 grammer & 2 sub grammers.
On the third day I used the 24" X 12" UFO again & hit on to a small patch of 8 pieces with it in a small area. Lots of .22 shells from rabbit shooters & lead bullet heads. I started to ignore those type of signals as it was bloody hot & I only started digging those sure sounding soft mellow signals that were usually gold or lead. I then put on the 15" X 12" commander & went over the same ground & got 3 more bits. 2 sub grammers & a little speci that was 1.30 grams. This was the first time I had used this coil & I was gobsmacked at its sensitivity & depth on these small pieces. I like it. Total for that day was 11 bits for 14.05 grams.
The next 3 days I went somewhere else & hit a small creek that had quite a bit of exsposed bed rock. I put on the 6" mono & just targeted the bed rock both in the water & above it. Over the 3 days I got 27 bits, all sub grammers for a total of 5.92 grams.
The next day I went back to the little patch I had found & used the nuggetfinder 12" X 7" & decided to dig up all the loud in your face signals incase they were masking a faint good signal. My first signal was a .22 shell, which I thought it was going to be. The 2nd was also going to be a .22 shell as it was a loud sharp in your face signal......or was it??? Two scrapes with the pick & it was gone. .22 shell for sure. Scooped up the pile & waved my hand over the coil & WHAM!!!! Then the signal had gone. It fell out of my hand & on to the coil. BLOODY HELL.....a gold nugget that ended up being 8.5 grams.  Just goes to show.... dig all signals. No matter what. I also got a .57 gram bit as well.
On my last day I put on the 12" X 15" & used it as my patch finder. Only managed 2 sub grammers. I then whacked on the 10" X 5" joey coil & went in amongst some old shallow workings & managed to squeak out 3 sub grammers. I never used the DD or the 18" mono. I used a hip stick on the 12" x 15" & the 24" X 12" UFO & could swing them all day effortlessly. I love the hip stick. Was detecting in deep/sensitive/fixed/all metal settings mostly with the occasional flick into normal.

The gold to the left is from up on a mountain side & no where near water or a water course. It is all pretty rough & shotty except for a couple of bits. All has some quartz still attached. The gold to the right is the water worn gold from the little creek bedrock. All up 41 grams. The old button was a very faint signal & it was down slightly more than the length of my pick handle which is 600mm. I was using the 15" X 12" commander mono. I was absolutly sure it was going to be gold after getting down to that depth & having found some nice gold very close by on a previous trip . What a bummer to unearth the button after all the time sweet & tears of digging that hole



Close up of the 8.5 grammer with bits of quartz still attached



The old button has what looks like "Victoria Moleskin" written on it. I am guessing the Victoria is Victoria in South Australia & has come off an old timer goldminers mole skin "jeans"



Happy hunting

JW 

Well JW. I really have to say you have come a long way from when I first met you to now as far as experience and success goes. Looking forward to some lessons from you now. lol  Congratulations. You will be able to buy your own bit of country down there before too long! Hope the wifes video sessions were a success.
Cheers
The Cat

A big hello to the Cat!

Hey there JW--what the heck? It sure has been a long time since you've given any news of what you've been up to. And, then when you do, you show up with a whack of sassy gold!!

Well done--beautiful stuff. What a nice reward for all of your determined, hard work.

I especially liked your story of digging up the 22 casings (how you wanted to clear the obvious targets in case they were hiding/masking something else--brilliant!). Now, that's a story that taught me a great lesson. I always dig everything (learned that one long ago), except when I'm in a trashy area, and then I convince myself that there's too much trash, and why bother. But, now you've got me thinking for sure.

There's some areas in good nugget ground that are full of old square nails from the 1800's--I know the spots. I've got tired of digging those nails more than once. But, the reality is--there's great gold there too.

So, I guess I'll just grid off an area and dig until there's no more sounds at all--those nails could be masking/hiding something good. Funny that fact didn't sink in before.

Who knows, maybe all I'll get is a pocket full of old nails, but at least I'll know they weren't hiding something much better!

All the best, and nice to see both of you again,

Lanny

Hi Guys, Well I have learnt a valuable lesson today & one you can all learn from my mistake. It has happened to me twice now at this same spot & only a couple of feet away from each other. The other weekend I went back to a spot where I had some exposed bed rock schist that was giving me three very strong signals that screamed at me .22 shell, .22 shell all in very close proximity to each other. Well last weekend I dug up those targets to get rid of them in case they were masking a good signal from that schist. Well they were not only masking one good signal, but 5.
Today I went back to these old sluiced workings thinking I had pretty much done them over for what ever gold they were going to give me. The bigger mono's were too noisy now in the wet ground & I had been all over them with my smaller mono's & 11"DD. Today I gave the 18" DD a run to see if there was anything of size at depth. I went to the spot where I had dug out those 3 .22 shells & then got those 5 good pieces. Well not 2 feet away there were a number of other loud junk targets that I decided to get rid of. They turned out to be lead bullet heads & then I got a "sweet" target that was a half gram piece of gold with the 18" DD in DD mode. It was only a couple of inches down & had I got rid of those junk targets earlier then any one of my other coils would have snapped it up.
So the lesson is.....GET RID OF ALL JUNK TARGETS!!!! You never know what they may be masking.

Happy hunting

JW     

G'day Wildcat  & Lanny . I put in the above quote from a post I did last year & echos what I said in my previous post & what you are talking about now Lanny. I have now lost count of the number of times I have found gold after getting rid of a junk signal that was drowning out any soft deeper gold signal. I now think back to how much gold I have left in the ground where, in my last post, that loud in your face signal was in fact a gold nugget itself. Being so close to the surface & a good size piece. Not really your normal gold sounding signal these days. They are usualy that very soft gentle smooth sounding signal.
Where I was detecting is a big open area & the gold could & is any where . So I was starting to ignore the loud junk sounding targets as it was bloody hot & I was getting sick of digging all the junk. But then of course you never know your luck as to the 8.5 grammer I got. But I have a massive area to cover & rather than grid an area totaly & dig EVERYTHING I was only digging the soft mellow sounds that are usualy gold but can also be lead. I was more intent on finding a patch, which I sort of did. I then slowed down & used a few different coils & dug every thing in that patch area.  Once the gold stopped coming I would just carry on with the big coil & cover as much ground as I could to hopefuly pick up another patch. There were of course the random loner bits where I would put a stick in the ground & often there would be a 2nd bit of gold close by were I would put in another marker & try to work out if there was a patten as to if the gold was on a down hill course or try to work out a direction the gold was coming from. There never was, so I am just picking that it is gold randomly dropped by a retreating glacier. No rhyme nor reason as to where it has really come from. Frustrating as there are reefs in the area but the quartz shows no sign of gold let alone the type of gold I am detecting in the area. More frustration. It does make for a very interesting area though & who knows....one day I just might uncover a blow of gold coming out of the ground. As long as I keep getting gold there I will keep at it. For ever searching for the SOURCE. Dont you love it?? I do

Happy hunting

JW   

good to hear from you cat ,and kiwi .been a while since you posted .

Hi Guys, Well I have learnt a valuable lesson today & one you can all learn from my mistake. It has happened to me twice now at this same spot & only a couple of feet away from each other. The other weekend I went back to a spot where I had some exposed bed rock schist that was giving me three very strong signals that screamed at me .22 shell, .22 shell all in very close proximity to each other. Well last weekend I dug up those targets to get rid of them in case they were masking a good signal from that schist. Well they were not only masking one good signal, but 5.
Today I went back to these old sluiced workings thinking I had pretty much done them over for what ever gold they were going to give me. The bigger mono's were too noisy now in the wet ground & I had been all over them with my smaller mono's & 11"DD. Today I gave the 18" DD a run to see if there was anything of size at depth. I went to the spot where I had dug out those 3 .22 shells & then got those 5 good pieces. Well not 2 feet away there were a number of other loud junk targets that I decided to get rid of. They turned out to be lead bullet heads & then I got a "sweet" target that was a half gram piece of gold with the 18" DD in DD mode. It was only a couple of inches down & had I got rid of those junk targets earlier then any one of my other coils would have snapped it up.
So the lesson is.....GET RID OF ALL JUNK TARGETS!!!! You never know what they may be masking.

Happy hunting

JW     

G'day Wildcat  & Lanny . I put in the above quote from a post I did last year & echos what I said in my previous post & what you are talking about now Lanny. I have now lost count of the number of times I have found gold after getting rid of a junk signal that was drowning out any soft deeper gold signal. I now think back to how much gold I have left in the ground where, in my last post, that loud in your face signal was in fact a gold nugget itself. Being so close to the surface & a good size piece. Not really your normal gold sounding signal these days. They are usualy that very soft gentle smooth sounding signal.
Where I was detecting is a big open area & the gold could & is any where . So I was starting to ignore the loud junk sounding targets as it was bloody hot & I was getting sick of digging all the junk. But then of course you never know your luck as to the 8.5 grammer I got. But I have a massive area to cover & rather than grid an area totaly & dig EVERYTHING I was only digging the soft mellow sounds that are usualy gold but can also be lead. I was more intent on finding a patch, which I sort of did. I then slowed down & used a few different coils & dug every thing in that patch area.  Once the gold stopped coming I would just carry on with the big coil & cover as much ground as I could to hopefuly pick up another patch. There were of course the random loner bits where I would put a stick in the ground & often there would be a 2nd bit of gold close by were I would put in another marker & try to work out if there was a patten as to if the gold was on a down hill course or try to work out a direction the gold was coming from. There never was, so I am just picking that it is gold randomly dropped by a retreating glacier. No rhyme nor reason as to where it has really come from. Frustrating as there are reefs in the area but the quartz shows no sign of gold let alone the type of gold I am detecting in the area. More frustration. It does make for a very interesting area though & who knows....one day I just might uncover a blow of gold coming out of the ground. As long as I keep getting gold there I will keep at it. For ever searching for the SOURCE. Dont you love it?? I do

Happy hunting

JW   

JW--Excellent lessons and excellent posts. It's funny to me sometimes how simple something is to understand when someone else explains it to you, and yet, on your own, you never seem to quite grasp how simple the concept really is.

I know of an are on the lip of a canyon--a spot where the oldtimer's took out lots of nugget gold. But, today, it's just loaded with nails (squares and rounds) from old sluicing operations (you know, the boxes rot and then the nails get moved along by run-off water to the edges of canyons where they get caught in bedrock traps all along the edges.

Well, I get so frustrated detecting along those edges due to all of the nails. However, reflecting on  your posts, I now realize that I'd spend my time better in getting rid of all of the loud masking signals, and then spending the time carefully, and slowly scrubbing the ground and detecting, listening for the soft sounds of gold. And, most of the time, that's exactly what it (the sound of gold) is--very, very soft.

So, the lesson here for me is that how in the world could you ever hear those soft sounds when the iron is screaming in your ears? Well, the simple answer and simple solution to the problem is you can't.

Well--thanks for the free online detecting lessons JW. I've now got some great gold traps to check out.

All the best,

Lanny

P.S. Thanks for allowing this discussion Wildcat.

 (Quote from Lanny),  So, the lesson here for me is that how in the world could you ever hear those soft sounds when the iron is screaming in your ears? Well, the simple answer and simple solution to the problem is you can't.

Hi Lanny, The simple answer & solution is.....REMOVE THEM 
That can be tedious I know .....but can be well worth the effort. The spot you are talking about.....try taking a big magnet or rear earth magnet & wave it over a signal. Hopefuly any iron rubbish will leap up on to it with little digging effort & save you a LOT of time.
Lanny... I have learnt a lot from your fantasic posts, & there have been many, over the years & glad I can "awaken" something that is helpful to you.
Yes this is all Wildcats fault  & I thank him immensely. We keep in touch with PM's.
All the best & Happy hunting

JW   
 

Hi JW, Strickman and Lanny. Well, the way life has been lately I have got very little prospecting done at all. In fact, I have only been doing a little relic hunting around my property and neighbouring properties and I have found something that I can't mention here.
Needless to say it was a surprise at the time. Sadly it was of no value to me. Interesting all the same.
I have been posting on another forum fairly regularly as JW knows under the avatar of Panther in case you come across me. 
JW, I am pleased you followed up the leads I gave you but I do believe your own perseverance and determination has been the key to your success.
Gotta go, the neighbour has arrived to cut some concrete for me.  Happy hunting

The Cat

Cat--where you at? Still chasin' the gold?

All the best,

Lanny

Hi Lanny, Nice to hear from you. Been very quiet here and only been out once in a long time. Still got lots to do on the property and health hasn't been great. (can't walk far) MRI tomorrow to see whats happening...(to legs)
Cheers
Cat

Cat--that sounds very serious--I sincerely hope all goes well. I'll be thinking of you. Sorry about that.

Keep us updated please.

All the best,

Lanny

Hi there Doug, Sorry to hear the health news. Hope you come right & get to the bottom of it & get back out there doing what you love to do.
I have been very quiet on the forums due to lack of getting out there swinging the coil. The Coromandel just isnt the place to do that but I still go up my favourite little creek with pan, box, hand crevice suckers & sometimes the 2" suction dredge. But even then the gold is pretty piss poor. Even more so when one gets "spoilt" down south. The access up this little creek I go to up here is very difficult & wears me out. I have now stached my gear back in then bush to save carting it in & out every time. Motors, pumps & every thing. So far it has survived. This area interests me as it was one of the very few areas that was ground sluiced for detrital (alluvial) gold in the very first days of gold discovery on the Coromandel. Mid 1860's. Through this ground sluicing of the surrounding hill side talas & the loose alluviam they uncovered very rich stringers of gold & got some great finds in the creek itself. As we know they never get it all but what was in the little creek they would have got so what I am finding in there has been washed in to there since they went through. They were pretty thorough though & chased these rich stringers into the hill sides & they have modified the ground no end with there trenching, quarrying & general hard rock mining activity.
The country is very steep. But I am sure there are some pockets of trapped gold somewhere between the reef stringers high up & the creek that there water from there ground sluicing wouldnt have dislodged. There just has to be.
I have been up there a few times with my GMT but it is such a hard task. I did find an old pick head complete with the metal wedge that held the handle in place. But no sign of any wooden handle. That was completely rotten away.





And some nice pieces of Jasper, not with the detector of course



The bush is getting the better of me though & keeps driving back in to the creek looking for the yellow, but I know there just has to be some good finds to be made up on the bush covered hill side.
This was my last play in the creek last friday. I know I have posted these pics on the bed rock & its mysteries page but they probably should have been on here.



Close up of both sides of the little speci bit





It is these little speci bits that I know are going to be trapped higher up & hopefully some bigger bits as well. It keeps me going back there for ever searching. Dont you love it.

Happy hunting

JW 

great to hear from you JW. Every little bit counts and even though the price of gold is fluctuating, it is still well worth while storing it up. I am ever hopeful of getting out regularly again, but, I had a laminectomy 17 years ago and it is not something you want to have again. I think the risk factor goes up and I don't want to end up in a wheelchair. The trouble is detecting involves a lot of spinal twisting and I don't think it is the best thing for me. I remain hopeful. Gotta go get ready for my MRI. Catch up later for one of these? 
Cat

G'day Wildcat. Very good to hear from you to mate. All the very best to you & I really do hope to share one of those with you.
take care

Regards

John