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What's Best, Cruising Or Crawling? My Last Day Gold.


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Gerry,

You've gotten lots of really good comments.  I wish I could react to many of the commets one at a time but have to 'put something together' that tells what I do and a little bit of what I think.  Steve covers most of my bases with his style and comments.

I feel like I've been 'called out' so to speak.  (As a help to me and others too!) I seem to be the poster boy for skipping around.  I have to admit you could call me the beach hunter of the desert or just call me impatient.  I don't know where to find gold in Rye Patch (and other places).  It's everywhere and it's nowhere.  I don't know where the 'known' patches are.  I just look for the random nuggets and if I find one I try to find another.

My last two trips to Rye Patch are my current pattern.  The first trip I drove all night and went out to an area where I had found one nugget before (3 years ago) and I stayed there for 2 hours.  Enough.  (I've been to this area at least 3 times since I found that nugget but didn't find any more.)  I go to another area where I had found a nugget and repeat the pattern not knowing if there is a patch there or not.  I camped out near the burn barrel.

I got up in the morning and my first target was a nice nugget.  I stayed there all day and didn't find any more.  I had done some research and joined a new club and I wanted to see Placeritos so I drove there and spent the night.  No nuggets but an interesting place to see.  I have no idea how to work this place so I leave, try to find a couple of meteorites on the dry lake and spend the night in Winnemucca.  The next day I drive to north of Elko on an exploration and drive back to the Eugenes and spend the night.  I hunt the area where I parked for half the day and go back to Rye Patch and find a little nugget on my first target but no more for that half day.  At the end of the day I drive back to Santa Monica.  I had a good trip.  

My next Rye Patch trip about a month later I come to the patch later in the afternoon and meet up with Chet after 2 PM and we go near where I ended the last trip.  I get out and start walking and my first target is a nugget.  A few minutes later I get another one and before dark at 6 PM I have another tiny nugget.  The next day Chet takes over that 100x100 spot to see if the Xcoil could find more.  He finds two nuggets there all day and I find one other nugget within 1/4 mile.  Next day we hit two spots (Fred saw us at one where I had found a nugget before but not this trip) and then we went back close to where we had been at the previous day and I found one more nugget.  I went back to near that area for half of the next day and that was my trip.  I detect sections 17 and 19 only when in Rye Patch.  I have it marked on my phone.

I'm on another trip now to Gold Basin.  I wanted to find a nugget with the 800 so yesterday I went to 4 places where I have found nuggets before.  There were no tiny nuggets for the 800.  I take shorter trips but I go back to where I've found nuggets.  I'm mostly a solo/skunk hunter.  I don't have a quad and I don't have a trailer to camp for a week.  

My Australia trip was a map trip.  I looked on a map and got to an area and detected.  I tried to understand the workings and get started as Steve has said but day after day it just didn't happen.  There was no one to tell me how to change that pattern.  After the first week I worked myself into an area where I had been given an exact pointy finger for a found nugget or two and I went to those places with the help of my phone GPS.  It resulted in nuggets but I found very little for my 20 days ... don't remind me.  If I'm not finding gold in an area that I know nothing about ... why should I stay?  I think I have a better chance of getting lucky than concentrating on an area that doesn't have any gold.  Experience is not my friend when it comes to gold hunting.  I started in 2011 after many of you hunted out some of the best spots.  (I must add that Adam and Mop took me to their patches and we didn't find anything either so the trip was not entirely solo.)

I've had a couple of areas over the years where I hunted that I would call a patch.  I could go out and find missed nuggets and new areas at the same time.  It is a foreign language to me to suggest that I go back and look for the deep nuggets on a patch I detected over 10 years ago.  Many clues and lots of nuggets are gone before I ever get to these patches.

Bottom line for me is I think I take short, intense trips to places I've been before expecting better results.  I might continue to find 'once in a lifetime nuggets' as Fred calls them if I did go to new places more often.

Mitchel

 

PS:  I thought all day about an important individual in Australia I did not mention in this post.  Thank you Reg Wilson for making a map for me near where you live and also putting me up for the first few days.  I was jet lagged and getting over a head cold and I didn't learn as much as I could have.  I did go back towards the end of my trip to the places you showed me when I stayed in Maryborough and followed that ridge you showed me.  Adam now has your map.  Thanks to your wife also.  Your home is something I'll always remember as picture perfect.

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I'm in the low and slow group, the cruising part doesn't produce good results. If I'm in an area that I have found nuggets in the past I'm more confident that I will another nugget or more. When you spend countless hours with the same detector and listening to what it is telling you, finding a nugget becomes second nature. Some people have a nose for gold and will find it with little effort, others it is a constant struggle. You have to figure out the best combination in technique, detector pluses and minuses, location and mental attitude to have any success.

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Low and slow in known patches and nugget producing spots always overlapping my swing.                                                                                 And even when out searching for new spots i go at a some what slow pace sometimes with overlapping swings sometimes not depends on the ground.

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We need more Mitchels!  🤣. Just teasing.  I think you might need to do more research and computation of that research.  Just to give an idea, i probably have 10-15 references for one small area, put them together, delineate the information, pre mark my maps (GPS) and then pound out the area.  I worked one area all summer.  Probably no bigger than a 1/4 section.  
 

If you take Gerry’s lessons you learn that pretty quickly.  I watched and learned.  People were wandering all over the place.  The folks who stayed low and went slow found the gold in areas that were surely hit before, even bulldozed.

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Fred,

I enjoy the 'teasing' so you don't have to stop.  I know you wish me and all of us the best.

As you know, I found my best nuggets in a meteorite strewn field and I'm going back there today.  Having only a day my choice is to go after the best meteorites or go back to areas where I've found gold and no meteorites.  It is hard to do both with the walking distances involved of several miles.

I'll let you know what I find and the choice I made but little irons are calling me.  haha

Mitchel

 

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Great thread you started, Gerry!  So much valuable info from so many experienced detectorists.  Thanks.

But there's an elephant in the room that apparently no one noticed, or noticed but is just too polite to mention.  Someone took on Lunk toe-to-toe and beat him!  That's a nugget few will ever find.  😁

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Also, there are a couple of undiscussed levels of detecting that at times can surpass  technique, knowledge and type of detector used:  luck and intuition. 

I can't count the number of times these aspects of detecting have come into play. Not sure it is something that can be cultivated or learned but it's definitely a part of what we do. 

Perhaps that's not for this discussion but just in case...

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1 hour ago, flakmagnet said:

Also, there are a couple of undiscussed levels of detecting that at times can surpass  technique, knowledge and type of detector used:  luck and intuition. 

There are plenty of people out there counting on just luck and intuition, perhaps aided by map dowsing. Good luck with that! :smile: The only ones I see consistently having any luck applying their intuition are the ones with the technique, knowledge, and the right detector.

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Yep, agree…

4 hours ago, Steve Herschbach said:

I see consistently having any luck applying their intuition are the ones with the technique, knowledge, and the right detector.

 

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