Would You Like Fries With That? A Nugget To Match My Chicken Drumstick Nugget :)

[phrunt]

JW and I went on another prospecting adventure yesterday, JW was taking the day off work as the night after our first hunt he woke up in the middle of the night with a cramp, and his leg is now very sore, although that didn't stop him wanting to go look for gold, he is dedicated so he contacted me asking if I wanted to go, of course that is a hell yes.  I still have my broken foot so we were both hobbling along.

We planned to go to the same area where I found my KFC Chicken drum stick nugget

On the way to the area we stopped at another spot, I'd only been here once for an hour or two, that time I tried to use my Gold Monster but had no success, this area is very salty and just drove the GM nuts, I couldn't use it but in his car I had the GPX 4500 with Nugget Finder EVO coil so I got that out and used it, it found me a piece of gold, I don't remember what settings I ended up using it was a couple of years ago but I know I had to adjust my settings from their usual settings for the salt. 

This time I had the GPZ and Equinox with me, I was going to try the Equinox but never got around to it, I just used the GPZ and 8" X-coil, I wasn't too confident it would work well with the salty soil and was going to change to the Concentric coil but JW encouraged me to give it a shot, there is a lot of thyme bushes in this area so the smaller coil would be very helpful to get between the bushes that the 12" coil would struggle with.  JW was right, the 8" worked fine and within about 5 minutes of putting my coil to the soil I had my first bit of gold.

I'm not that organised but I think it's this nugget

It wasn't all that deep but it was a very booming signal.

You'll notice from this shot how different the soil looks compared to the other area we were heading to. 

About 10 minutes after I found my piece JW found one with his GPX 6000, we spent another hour or so looking around and found nothing more so we moved on, so we had one each from this area.

The next place we went we decided to just stay right at the start seeing he's got a bung leg and I have a bad foot we didn't want to have to walk far, especially on hillsides, and by that I mean right at the entrance, we didn't even leave the dirt road area going in, we'd done this area before a couple of years ago at the time I would have been using my GPX 4500 and GM1000 and JW was using his GPZ 7000 with standard coil, it has been a while since we've done it, he'd previously done it with older GP detectors too and VLF's.  I stayed in High Yield, Normal 20 all day and JW had his GPX maxed out too.

It wasn't long after arriving and I had my first nugget. 

It looks like one of the fries to go with my KFC chicken drum stick from the other day 🙂

 

A decent weight too for the area.  It sounded pretty funky being a long thin bit but was a simple target.

The next ones were all quite small but I just kept finding more and more, it was fun.

This spot had three next to each other, you'll see where my coil is, just down below that is two big rocks, each of those rocks was a dig hole for nuggets.

Another one 🙂

A bit of a ball.

This one was tiny, a 0.043 of a gram nugget, simple target though as you'll see if you watch the video of it.

And another one

I even lost count of how many I found, usual for me 🙂

Here is a video of my second smallest one, a 0.065 of a gram

We often compared the nuggets we found on each others detectors and both the 6000 and 7000 were equally doing well on all the nuggets,  there was no obvious winner that's for sure, very close and I'd say I'd prefer to use the 7000 as the smaller coil was beneficial for poking around especially when the thyme bushes are involved, but soon the 6000 will have small coils anyway from various brands.

So here are my weights

And my total

Jw was hunting within 10 to 20 meters of me all day (30 to 60 feet) and the detectors behaved very well, he had to get very close to me for the 6000 to cause a problem with the 7000, and the same the other way around, it was pretty good being able to hunt near each other like that without any problems.

Here is Jw's total for the day with his GPX 6000, 1 at the salty spot and another three at this KFC drum stick spot.

 

[phrunt]

I forgot my traditional junk photo.  Here is the junk from both spots.

[abenson]

The x coil on the 7000 looks pretty impressive on that small stuff. That junk plate is what a typical Arizona gold hunt would look like for me LOL.

[brogansown]

Phrunt,

Your junk photo looks almost identical to most of mine.  Nice nuggets too.

[Gerry in Idaho]

Very informative info and results with that small coil on the GPZ.  Yes it does look like a french fry and the last pic of trash is the leftovers casserole.  Well done again Simon.

[MSC]

Amazing how sensitive that X-coil is on that tiny piece of gold at inches above the coil. Good story, pictures, and gold. Sounds like a fun time. Good luck next adventure.  

[Dirtshark]

1 hour ago, phrunt said:

I forgot my traditional junk photo.  Here is the junk from both spots.

Lol 22LRs and pull tabs. Some good old boys had a night there. 

I can't imagine finding gold like that. Congrats. 

[jasong]

Nice work! That 8" is a great little coil. Good to see it's keeping up with the 6000. I personally feel like the sensitivity edge just barely goes to the 6000, but it sure is close. I think the 8" does better overall in really salty ground than the 6000 does though - but with the new smaller 6000 coils this balance should shift as the small coils always do better in salt than bigger ones.

I really hope that the X Coils are compatible with whatever the next GPZ iteration will be. I suspect ML might find a way to redesign things to make that impossible though.

[phrunt]

Yea, both the GPZ and GPX 6000 are like cheating on this small gold.  It's really fun though, I enjoy finding small gold, it's value isn't there but the challenge is good.

[klunker]

 Boy am I glad there's a whole bunch of ocean between you and the Northern Sierra Nevada. I'm terrified to think what you would do an area with larger gold.