1864hatter

Beautiful location and fantastic gold. I've got a real soft spot for crystalline gold 

Hi phrunt, 1.2g is better than nothing, makes for a low hourly rate $ though! 

With yesterday being fathers day I went down to my claim with my dad. Targeted the same spot as last time where I got 3.2g in an hour. This time we spent almost 4hrs and did a huge amount of digging but only managed to find 1.2g. Including a little specimen, which is a bit more rare for that area.Such is life, golden day out with dad though.

Thanks for your kind remarks folks, this gold is from the Marlborough region in the South Island of NZ. 

Although I could be persuaded to get an equinox 800😉

Interesting about the coil covers, I used to get white ones and then later when I got a replacement coil it does not fit the white covers anymore. Not sure what the change was about, no change in performance seemingly. I still really rate the gold bug as a detector despite having seen in action and used a number of other (late model) detectors. Largely due to the local geology and my style of gold digging. 

That gold bug is almost 10 years old and still going strong. Have yet to find a way to kill it. 100s of trips under its belt if you include land based relic hunts. 

Some additional photos of the gold, including close ups of the largest one which I believe shows some remnants of crystal character. Quite rare in Nz 

Hi guys and girls, 

My wife is due to give birth to our second child next weekend so I thought I'd squeeze in a quick trip up to the local gold field to find some gold. We'd had a fresh dusting of snow on the higher hills the day before and so my very pregnant wife, daughter and mother in law decided to tag along to try and find some snow. 

We drove up to the same spot I last went to on our claim with my 2yo daughter. I was dropped off at the creek and the ladies continued on up the hill for a snow/picnic adventure. We arranged to meet back at the road in 1.5hrs time. 

The spot I chose has a 1.5m high gravel/clay Bank resting on bedrock. Flooding has exposed the bedrock at the base and on our last trip we were successful in finding gold by removing the remaining material off the bedrock and detecting the nooks and crannies. 

This time I applied the same method and soon found my first piece of perhaps 0.3g. There were some very large worms in some of the gravely clay which were very impressive! Some almost half a meter long! 

So I managed to get 6 pieces for one hours digging and detecting. The largest was 1.6g and the total weight was 3.2g. A perfect quick mission before baby arrives. Alas the ladies didn't find any snow. 

Cheers 

Hi John, yeah I hope my daughter gets the bug. Maybe it would be better if she had a milder dose of the fever than me though. I'd like to do more posts / videos but unfortunately I've not been getting out golding as much as I'd like and I'm generally too busy to do write ups. Plus I'm about to start an extension on my house and have another kid due in August. I'll be lucky to sneak out a few more times this year. 

I'm glad you get out as much as you do and do a superb job of reporting on your trips. I especially like your down to earth reporting on the various minelab models. I might add another detector to my arsenal once the house is done... Equinox or sdc not sure yet. 

Thanks for the comments guys. I'm hoping that my daughter grows up to appreciate the outdoors as much as I do. In my opinion too many kids these days are stuck indoors without the opportunity / motivation to get outside and get muddy like I used to. 

Gidday phrunt, you have to bribe kids these days. I had to get a tablet with cartoons out for a bit. The claim is patchy, have found less than today in a whole day on odd occasions. 

So today I thought it was about time I took my 2.5 year old daughter out to my gold claim. The claim is in reasonably rugged country with steep slopes and dense vegetation. Most of the gold is found as small nuggets on or near bedrock. There was one spot I could think of that was within 100m of the road where a river bank had been washed out and bedrock was exposed. That said I knew I'd have to cut a bit of a track through the vegetation to get the little girl through.

We got to our location after a bit of a scramble down a short but steep slope with the aid of a rope. Was a bit of a performance with a backpack on my back and carrying my daughter. I set her up on a grassy bank next to where I'd be digging and surrounded her with snacks with which to entertain herself. 

As luck would have it I managed to uncover three small nuggets by clearing the gravels off the bedrock and detecting it. After about an hour she'd had enough and we clamberd back to my car.

Needless to say, I'm very proud that she's now big and patient enough to take gold hunting!    

Oh, we got 0.8g total. However in this case the memories (at least for me) are priceless. 

A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to be offered the use of a Macro Gold Racer with an 8x4 inch coil by a prominent local metal detecting personality. His name is Julian and has the blog at www.marlboroughmetaldetecting.com where he keeps track of all his finds and such.

My first outing was with the racer was a lazy Sunday trip to a spot on a local river that you can literally drive right into the river. I was with 4 other guys, one intended to snipe and the others had three different detectors between them. We spent a few hours here which saw me locate quite a number of very small lead shot targets in bedrock crevices but gold eluded me right to the end of the day when I found a tiny 0.12g flake. Initial thoughts about the detector after this outing was that it was quite hot at finding tiny targets and it was the only detector that found gold on this day.

My next trip was to a somewhat more remote area that turned out a little trick to get to. I had suspicions that there might be gold in this particular waterway based on local geology and nearby discoveries. As soon as we go to the river it became apparent that the VLF detectors we had with us were not going to handle the local levels of ground mineralisation. Bedrock was a mixture of igneous rock that in some cases overloaded the detector completely. Despite the racers variety of settings to enable detecting in tougher ground I found it impossible to get it to function here. I could get it to run reasonably quiet but then I was only able to detect a half grammer at a couple of cm and the signal was far from crisp.

And lucky last trip. I took the detector to a mates’ claim for a run. This spot is also in quite a public spot and myself and others have hammered it in the past. At an estimate I have taken a couple of oz’s from it in the past in the form of predominantly <0.5g nuggets. The racer ran very nicely here with sensitivity at 80 and isat at about mid-way. It didn’t take long before I started pulling tiny lead shot soon followed by a crevice that gave a weak signal. With a bit of chipping I recovered about 20 small flakes and colours to for a total of maybe 0.1g from the crevice (not in picture). The gold was all located in an area the size of a 10c coin. I was impressed at having found such small gold despite it being shallow as normally an aggregation of targets seems to be quieter than one large target of similar weigh. Or so I have found.

I carried on for a couple of hours and got 6 further pieces of gold for a total of 0.2g as well as a bunch of lead. In fact, 5 of the pieces together weigh just 0.1g!

So, it seems the racer is ridiculously sensitive to small gold and has plenty of scope to be manually adapted to different ground. Personally, I found the detector a bit on the “manual” side with the option of setting a lot of search parameters yourself. I know this is preferred by some and less so by others, just like manual and automatic cars I guess.

I’d like to say thanks to Julian for the opportunity to let me use his Racer, especially as he didn’t know me at all. It’s always fun trying a new bit of kit.

One of the guys at my workplace has been tagging along on some of my recent gold trips and has thus been inspired to purchase the GM1000 from a local dealer as soon as it became available.

As a first outing we went to a claim I am a partner in for some detecting. We went as part of a group of 5 that had 4 different types of detectors with them. We have detected this river claim extensively and unless there is a flood that moves some material and exposes bedrock we don't find a lot anymore. Consequently we often dig by hand and scan the bedrock that we expose to recover the gold.

Once at the claim three guys got to work digging a hole while myself and my friend with the GM took off up the creek in order for me to teach him how to use a detector. The plan was for me to use the GM1000 for a while and get him to watch me work while I told him what I was doing and then gradually hand over to him.

First gold came after about two steps in a bedrock crevice. I had detected a small nugget in the same crevice before on a previous outing but obviously the GM was more sensitive and had managed to find something. There were two tiny prices in the crevice. We continued up the creek and found a few pieces here and there, all were small to very very small. Some bits well below 0.1g.

After about half a dozen bits I left my friend to carry on on his own and joined the other three guys with digging the hole.

After a couple of hours the man with the GM returned successful, he'd found his first three pieces of gold and was very happy. After that I got my hands back on his detector and found more pieces up and down the creek.

The main points of interest with using the GM1000 I found are;

Pros-
#easy turn on and go operation
#very sensitive to small gold
#light weight
#quite reliable ferrous / non ferrous indicator
#lack of threshold easier for amateurs to interpret
#clear signal from targets
#excellent pinpointing

Cons-

#picks up hot rocks
#signals when entering water
#sensitive to coil and coil cable banging (although, what detector isn't)

Generally I think this detector is a top performing VLF that is ideal for hunting gold in bedrock crevices or other shallow ground. Ideal for getting the last scraps from gold producing areas. Not so good for outright depth or areas with a lot of hot rocks as, despite the ferrous indicator, they still make a signal to burden your ears. Much of the gold that we got with the GM seems to have been quite small and other detectors simply missed them. We were calling these pieces monster flakes! 

Clarifications,

Detector was run in maximum sensitivity in the deep / all metal setting. Bedrock is generally un-mineralised with isolated bands of noisy rock. 5 inch coil was used.And the total loot in the picture below, biggest bit is 1.39g (found with SDC2300 but anything could have found it). All but I think three pieces were found with the GM1000.

If you have any questions I will do my best to answer.

Not Rum, but we did carry in a nice bit of wine with us to go with campfire stories.

Frustration is right, I found a 35g nugget in a particular area and am still to find even the tiniest of its compadres. I swear one day I will go back there to seek and destroy, that is I will do my best to find some of its mates.

The best thing I have found for cleaning out deeper crevices are sabre saw blades. I usually fashion some sort of handle for them. I would prefer to actually break open the crevice so as not to potentially damage the nuggets I am trying to retrieve but if it is just small gold that will be in there then it is probably just as effective to use the saw blades to scrape them out.

I have found gold in cracks in bedrock only a couple of mmm wide. One memorable one yielded half an ounce of flat smooth gold, the crevice was around half a metre deep and less than 5mm at the top and got narrower towards the base. it pays to chase them all the way down! See my videos on youtube, my channel is Mat Brandl and most of my gold comes from bedrock crevices.

http://www.weather.com/news/climate/news/el-nino-outlook-strong-possible-may2015

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.

OK so with the help of Trev (NZ) I have managed to send an email to the Sailor that lost the above reply. Will inform you upon receipt of a reply. Also see paydirt.co.nz at the above link to follow this story in more detail

http://www.legacy.com/obituarie...-zuder&pid=153418825

So today I was out detecting at the beach here in Auckland NZ. I found some old coins a 9ct ring and and importantly a WWII dog tag.

I posted about my finds on a local forum (paydirt) and a member of that forum suggested I also post the find here. The reason for posting about the dog tag here is that someone on here may be able to track down relatives of the solider that lost this tag and reuniting them. If anyone could be of help that would be cool. I have attached a few photos and a link to an obituary for the solider that provides some info. Thanks in advance for any help!!

Looks rather unusual for a  natural nugget. Call me sceptical