1864hatter

While magnets might work for a slight amount of ironsand they won't work where we will be dredging. We have tens of kilos of the stuff to deal with.

Hi there, Has anyone had any experience with suction dredging in rivers with fine gold and a lot of iron sand / black sand (say up to 10% of gravel which passes through the sluice). I'm considering the use of hydraulic riffles but can't find any data in regards to relative gain in recovery versus a standard keene triple type sluice box. I realise this is a very complex issue as a lot of factors affect the recovery of gold but it would be good to hear from someone who's had some practical experience. Pictures of the gold at the location.

I have a spot in a creek where is found a 35g nugget on my first visit. There is no written history of gold specifically in this creek but the surrounding area is gold bearing. Have never managed to find anything else there...

Hey folks, I met up with a few friends on boxing day and headed into the wilderness to try and find some gold. After a hike into the location and setting up camp I headed off with my sniping gear to find my fortune, about 10.30am. By 1pm I had about a gram and a half in small pieces from a range of crevices. At this point I had a short break and considered my options. I chose a good looking crevice which cut across the river and had a good bedrock / current arrangement. After removing a little of the gravel which covered most of the crevice I spotted a couple of of slightly chunkier bits than what I’d got earlier. Well, shortly after this the crevice really pu on a show and in the following 1.5hours I found some fantastic gold. I ended up with 29.6g for the 4.5hrs I’d spent in the creek. This is pretty up there in terms of total gold Iver personally found in a day.

Some more yellow stuff today. This time from a different area. 13.4g, biggest piece is 3.1g.

Certainly one of the better days we've had lately. Bring on summer!

Hi there, It was fathers day recently here in New Zealand and as my wife and I have a habit of getting a day to do what we wish on mothers / fathers day I chose to go detecting. Area of choice this time was a somewhat remote but relatively well detected area. As I'd only fairly recently (in the last year) come to get to grips with my equinox 800 I thought I might be able to produce something with it. My good friend accompanied me on this trip and when we arrived to our chosen river after a 3hr journey from home he set about sniping in a bedrock area where we'd found some gold previously. I also had a bit of a snipe but it wasn't too far above freezing so I decided to go detecting. If found about 4 micro nuggets / flakes in the first 10 minutes. Then I crossed the river to the next area of bedrock and got another small piece in a crevice that led under some gravel and boulders in a likely drop on bedrock. I decided on a hunch to clear a little of this material off the crevice and detected it again. Another target was uncovered straight away. This target actually was the start of a concentration of a few dozen tiny pieces along a 1m long shallow crevice. Took me a couple of hours to get get it all out. Thi is what I got from there, maybe 6 grams. After the success from that crevice I found another similar bedrock situation close by and got another couple of grams or so from that. This was a lot more than my friend found sniping in the same time, and I was warm and dry! The rest of the day we sniped and detected various areas and the equinox steadily found small flakey nuggets and my friend got some slightly larger bits and pieces from his sniping. All in all a very enjoyable father's day with a respectable total of 14.9g between us for the day

I spend a lot of my time looking for gold in rivers and streams, I call a sunbaker anything thing that is immediately visible as it is naturally positioned, without covering of gravels. Even if it is a meter under water.

Thanks for taking the time to bring us these great stories from around the world. I hope you get the chance to produce more of them!