3 Little Tiddlers With The GPZ

[phrunt]

I haven't done a story on a gold find for a while, partly because once you find a patch with a bunch of nuggets everything else seems pretty insignificant, a couple of months ago  I did just that, it's only my second patch but had quite a number of nuggets, I'd guess at least 40 (Correction: at least 80 nuggets) and over 30 grams in total.   I lost count of both the nuggets and the grams we got out of it in the end.  I did take a couple of videos on the first and second day of it, after that I stopped filming and just worried about detecting as filming videos is very time consuming and wastes valuable detecting time 🙂   That patch has been the highlight of my detecting time and hopefully I can find another in the future, I'll put links to the videos for anyone that wants to watch them and hasn't seen them already.

https://youtu.be/qs-e8HO7xdU

https://youtu.be/tppU5XZe77o

Now to the more recent adventure, one of the most common gold spots I've been to is being developed, very soon it will no longer exist, already a large area of it has disappeared over the past few months with more to go yet, seeing it's probably the closest gold spot to home and one I've found a reasonable amount of gold before so it will be missed greatly.  It's obviously getting extremely hard to find gold there as it's not a huge area really and it's been done a lot over the years by a number of people being an obvious spot to look.

My focus on this day was to take advantage of how well the GPZ and Concentric coil handles EMI to hunt almost exclusive in and around the power lines where people including myself with previous setups were unable to really detect very well, especially with my GPX 4500, it was terrible near the power lines, and what inspired me to try out a QED which ended up working quite well under the power lines but just didn't have the power of the GPZ.

I didn't take all that many photos as my aim was to get some video, I always struggle to get gold finds on video as I just use my phone to film and I have to put it down to do the recovery 🙂 I have a GoPro but just haven't bothered to use it yet. 

I went to some bedrock and worked my way up digging every signal and recording and deleting all the recordings as they were turning out to be shotgun pellets, this is entirely normal in this area as it has a big rabbit plague and shooters love spreading their pellets around all over the place for me to dig back up again.

Here is a video of the first gold find, a .109 of a gram nugget, I was pretty happy with that to start the day as often at this location I go home empty handed.  I didn't get the entire thing on video and I had my detector in difficult from when I was messing around the other day doing some testing and didn't check my settings, I'd never normally use difficult in my soil as Normal works just fine. Fortunately it didn't prevent me finding the gold, or the numerous pellets before it 

Once I'd finished that bedrock area I walked up under the power lines to detect hoping I'd find something others couldn't get, I took a little video there of how the detector was working under the lines, I really love how well the GPZ handles power lines seeing they're in many of my gold areas.  You'll also notice at the end of the video the millions of bits of rabbit poo on the ground, this is the reason for the shotgun pellets everywhere.

You'll notice in the video I discover I'm in difficult and seem a bit surprised, this is when I worked out I may have wasted the past hour detecting in difficult and it went through my head now I'll have to go check that bedrock again 😛  I was quite happy at that point I took the video or I may not have noticed for the rest of the day.

I started detecting along under the power lines and ended up in a little area I don't think I've been into before, I'm terrible with directions and locations so it's quite possible I have been there before and don't remember it but it didn't look familiar, I was still recording every target dig to try get a gold find on video and managed to do it, I think this might be my first time ever getting one from start to finish on video, quite happy with that.

And a couple of photos of it.

And my lucky last nugget of the day if you could call it that was a 0.038 of a gram nugget, very shallow on some bedrock, it took me about 20 minutes to recover this one, but I only got a portion of it on video, I kept moving it around but couldn't pick it up, I had no idea where it was in the cleared area, I was wishing I had a VLF with me with tiny coil to narrow it down.

I'd imagine there are quite a lot of these little guys around it's just the amount of pellets you'd have to dig to find them would be crazy.  I do it more for the challenge but the novelty wears off after digging a massive amount of pellets and not finding any nuggets and if you ignore the pellets you'll miss these little bits of gold. 

So here are the 3 little bits for the day

and the weights

All a bit of good fun, I really enjoy chasing these little bits especially after the first one pops up to get you into gear looking for more.  I can't compete with the photos lately out of Alaska for gold though, I'm just glad I can do the hobby near home and find a few bits to keep me happy.

Here is a little tour video of where I was detecting.

Keep in mind to run these coils you need to have an adapter and that involves cutting the end off your existing GPZ coil and making an adapter out of it, it should only ever be taken on by someone very skilled at electronics or really the best thing to do is get a professional to make the adapter for you to avoid any problems.

[Valens Legacy]

Thanks for the videos and glad you found some gold.

Hope you have more luck on your next hunt.

[phrunt]

Yea, I'm just glad I got any, this spot prior to getting a GPZ was my nemesis, I'd only ever found a couple of nugget there in a year or so of regular detecting with my previous detectors.  The extra depth the GPZ can achieve on these smaller bits can bring old ground to life, and obviously some bits are just raw hard work digging through the abundance of shotgun pellets 🙂

[Erik Oostra]

Great post Phrunt, especially the 'start to finish' video.. it's also always nice to see where other people are prospecting.. despite the shotgun pellets you're a lucky man to be where you are..  

[MSC]

Good going phrunt, the GPZ still has value.