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Now I wish there was some epic story to go with this find to match the sense of achiement I got from finding it. I have been detecting for around 6 years and have dedicated a large amount of time to researching the topic (for both gold nuggets and treasure/jewellery) and I have been reasonably successful. Well at least I have always had a good time out hunting . Anyway. Our local beaches have become sanded in over the summer and finds have been hard to come by of late with just the odd gold ring for entertainment (and then just 9ct). Tonight I went to a beach and noticed that the far end, about 200m away, had washed out exposing the soft clayey bedrock. The base is a sort of mudstone and in this area had just a few crevices that might hold goodies. The rest was smooth and barren. Most of the crevices had iron signals which kick the discrimination of my excal 2 into action and killed the threshold. So I get a loud positive signal and look down. See the edge of a gold tinged coin, no way, and I pick it up. JOB DONE! Meant to be I recon.

Lucky- I detect in too much ugly country to use a bungee I detect left handed. If you want to argue the point, since owning a Z, I have developed a mean left hook.

My office computer woes shut me down this afternoon. Soooo, I left it to the IT guys and escaped for a short swinging session with the SDC. Found this little .2 subgrammer within 10 seconds of turning the machine on! It was left for me courtesy of a dry washer who, obviously, did not believe in detecting his tailing pile. I walked up to the pile that was maybe thirty yards from my truck turned the machine on performed a quick balance swung over the top of the pile and BANG... Signal! Out came this little guy. There were four piles within a few yards of each other so I kicked them all down and detected them. This was the only one. Climbed back in the truck and was out of there in about an hour. I think this is what they mean when one "turns lemons in to lemon aid". Not huge by any stretch but it beat the skunk. Dean

Chuck, We'll need to start calling her the "Golden Girl of CA".

This one was found by a hunting partner... 3.5 ouncer

It's been said "iron is the mother of gold". I've found several gold/ironstone nuggets in Arizona. My camera won't download pictures to my computer for some reason. So I did these on my scanner and if you look hard you can see the gold is stuck to the rare earth magnet. Some of the nuggets show very little iron on them but all nuggets are magnetic except the one at the lower right. I guess it must be hematite and the others are magnetite.

A picture is always worth a lot of words, this nugget was 2 1/2 ounces at a measured 2 1/2 feet. I tried every timing configuration possible on the GPX 5000 including Sharp with a 20" monoloop coil and could get zero response. The GPZ with 14" Super D coil could easily see this target in all Gold modes and Ground Type modes, in General Difficult I could lift the coil 5 to 8 inches above the target and still hear it. JP

Bonus post by JP with pinpointing tips http://golddetecting.4umer.net/t21485-gpz-my-rating-4-out-of-10-and-thats-being-kind#208623 I am glad people are finding the information useful. I have to admit in my case I simply am putting in hours detecting with the GPZ. I run at stock settings with just a couple changes and basically just use the Quick Start procedure and go detecting. The machine seems very easy to understand and operate compared to a GPX. People reading all the posts would think the GPZ is far more complicated than I think it is.