mn90403

Last Thursday night it was time for a Gold Basin trip. I knew I had a couple of days so off I went. The trip for me consists of leaving sometime in the middle of the night, driving 375 miles (6+hrs) and then beginning the hunt. I've done this many times since I first started going there in 2011. It is not an area where I've found a lot of gold but I've found some. Meteorites are also around but I didn't seek them this trip. When you go into gold basin there is always this sign. It is not the old Gold Basin road that is about 5 miles away but it makes for a good picture! These first couple of pictures were taken about 8 AM so I did pretty good with a couple of stops since I left at 1 AM. The hunt was on. I wanted to find something with the 6 inch Nox so I hunted with it for the morning and the afternoon. I'll save my details about that for another thread but I did manage to get a little .32g nugget with the Zed before the day was over. No skunk at least. My camping spot was near where I found the nugget. I slept in the 4Runner with all of the things outside. It was a great night without wind. This was the dawn the next morning looking out my bedroom window. After a bit more searching in this area it was time to explore and I ended up in a gully. You can get an idea of a partially dry washed and detected gully from these pictures. I didn't get any gold out of this stop but I did later. I called a friend and told him where I had been and what I had done and he suggested a place to go. It was very similar to the pictures (it all looks the same) but this time I was using the 7000! I heard a little mellow signal and dug down about 5 inches to bedrock and thought ... oh, no ... hot rock again but then the target moved and the bedrock stayed! In the scoop screaming ... a nice little .42g nugget! Two days, two nuggets for .75g total. This is better than I normally do in Gold Basin. The weather started closing in so it was time to go. It is better to stay longer there now because of the long drive but I was not going to stay in the rain. On the way out I had some visual treats. Mitchel

More info on the 30-35,000 ounces! https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/small-miner-big-wa-nuggets-20181003-p507m2.html

Why do you say specimen? It looks like a bunch of fused together small nuggets without any quartz. I think you should check your scale. I'd say you were in grams mode and not grains. Mitchel

Ouch!

Here is the 1.2g nugget from the contest.

Yesterday I participated in a couple of organized hunts as part of the club I belong to that goes out to the desert. One hunt was put out into a natural area and we had to find two different sizes of pellets. These are the pellets you use in an air riffle. The larger pellet was about the .22 caliber size. The other pellet was about .17. We had a chance to 'see' them on the surface and my Equinox showed the big pellet at 4 and the small pellet at 2. No problem I thought. It was a 'large' area to hunt. The pellets had been buried with a pick at 2-4 inches. There were about 15 of us. We could use any detector but I decided to use the Nox6. Others were using GB Pros, 2s, Monsters but no PIs. The hunt begins and I start swinging and I get lots of garbled signals. I get lots of negative numbers because of trash and hot rocks and foils. This is a natural field. I can't HEAR what I heard in the test area. I've balanced, cancelled and running around 21. I can't dig a pellet. Finally I get one! The contest was for nuggets and you had to get 2 large pellets and 3 small ones. One of our best nugget hunters (Lucky Joe) had finished in 12.5 minutes. He had also found 5 nuggets in the morning before the hunt. At the time he finished I didn't even have one. Others of us kept hunting and hunting (my mind said this was a trick) without getting clear signals. The next finisher took over an hour and the contest ended at about 2 hours. I ended up with 7 large pellets and only 1 small one. Several others never found that many and a couple of good detectorists I know who find more gold than me said their detector could not see the targets on that field. They quit. So, I'm left knowing that I can't hear what others are hearing in order to win or find as many targets. My hearing truly is in trouble. I woke up this morning knowing I have to set up more test gardens so I don't go insane. (Insanity: Keep on doing the same things and expecting different results!) My technique and hearing result in many missed targets. There are other variables but that is the bottom line. My results were poor. I need more practice. The good news was in the second contest with fewer detectorists there was just one gold nugget (1.2g) buried in a vial. The field was smaller but our contest organizer put it in a volcanic hot rock area. He kept reducing the area where we were hunting so that after 30 minutes we were just about standing on ourselves and I managed to scrape out the vial before anyone else could find it. That was my only gold of the day. Mitchel

Well done Rob. That's a good beach when the conditions are right. Mitchel

Ok, thanks. Some of them seem to offer quite a bit of detail as it is a stock 'play' first and gold second I would suspect. Still, gold is being found. Is the potential gold as great as is stated?

Lots of news here and some good research. Is anyone reading these posts? https://stockhead.com.au/resources/pilbara-gold-nugget-story-sparks-into-life-as-minrex-gets-excellent-results/

Beauties!

When you connected the 7000 and 3030 to the database which allows you to keep your finds I had wondered how the XChange2 was shared or if it could be hacked. I liked being able to push the find button and heading back to a previous location on a map and with the detector. The last update for the 7000 disabled a portion of the 7000s abilities and some of the users had decided that the GPS was using too much 'power' and disabled anyway.

I think what some people are getting confused is a cell phone that has a GPS integrated into the system. The cell phone has a transmit ability that constantly updates a location by cell tower and GPS. When a 'history' is made of where the cell phone has been you can see it. It is 'retrieved' from the application and you can locate your lost cell phone and route information. Does ML have access to the phone records? I don't think so. There are millions of devices that use the satellites to 'see' where you are electronically just like looking at the stars. They don't transmit. Old fashioned detective work is still alive and well in the gold fields. Mitchel

JW, You need to come over to Rye Patch and hunt with Rick and we need to go over to NZ and hunt with YOU. Who is more lucky? (My meaning is both of you know where the gold is hiding that the rest of us don't find!) It's more than luck. Mitchel

GlazedTofu, I must make a 'note' on the age process or dating of the coin. Just because the name is on the coin and we know the date of the emperor's life and reign, my wife could not say that the coin was made while the emperor was living. Sometimes a younger ruler would honor the previous ruler and put their name on a coin. More research would be needed on the other words and 'look' of the coin to determine age. What she did tell me is that the coin would have come from China with the miners so that makes it over 100 years old. It seems there are lots of reproductions of these coins made now in China so it is harder to tell the age of a coin from China than many of the coins found here. Mitchel

Ok, according to my Chinese wife the ruler that the coin references is Kangxi in the Qing Dynasty. That is the second name (reign title: K'ANG-HSI, AD 1662-1722) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_Emperor

Here are some ideas about where they are going! https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/pacton-expands-exploration-to-include-its-friendly-creek-project-in-the-pilbara-s-egina-area-1027555890

The dimes ... well ... This is the first time in a long time I have found a dime on the beach. Let me just say that a couple of nights out I found a lot of coins and on others I did not. Two nights I found over twenty dimes each night. I just dig'em and look'em after the hunt and throw them into the tumbler. A couple of nights ago all the coins were in one of those Harbor Freight tumblers with some cleaner and sand. I decided it was enough so they tumbled for a couple of hours. When they came out and I was drying them it was easy to see these two dimes. They are very clean and look 'new' to my eyes. I don't know what night or what beach they came from. Thanks for asking Fred. Mitchel

JW, It is amazing all of the videos I watch from Oz and none of them has a scoop. (I want to shout 'Get a scoop!') I recon that the gold they expect to find is too big for it. I wonder if Paul has gotten them in the habit of using one now or if he has been forced to use his hands. Mitchel

That particular set of sunglasses was on top. I get lots of pieces and at times lots of complete glasses. I kept this pair because of the unique color combination. Manny glasses only have the metal hinge but some are wire rim glasses and are down very deep like some of the cell phones I find. (I did have a couple of those but it would have detracted from the display this month.) Mitchel

Every 3rd Friday of the month the metal detecting club I belong to allows us to display our 'finds of the month' as a competition. The categories are listed on the white board below my display. This month my display number was 19. I had an entry for each category this month. All of the items were found with the 800 using the 11" coil. (You can see the club info and pictures of past finds here: http://prospectorsclub.org/ ) I've put in a few hours over the last week because conditions were good. What I didn't show were the coins that I found which was about $50. So I dug a lot of holes when you add in the trash! About 3 nights ago I went out on a low tide and was not finding much on my first beach. I was getting ready to go and I found a piece of micro jewelry. I didn't really want to leave so I began a SLOW grid of the area. Just about every target started out as a negative number. I kept gridding and found another micro piece as one of the studs, nothing very exciting but a target. I locked into the slow pattern at the 'bottom of the hill' which is the end of the steep part of a beach slant. I ended up with 5-6 small pieces and was satisfied with that. Sometimes after I grid I look at the holes I've dug and consider the depth of the targets and extend that line or cross over where I've been before. One of these times I extended the grid and came back to the pattern and I heard a 17. Well, the Nox does 13, 20,21,30,31 and 15s quite often so 17 was a digger in all metal. I took my normal couple of scoops and the target was still there. This was the deepest target in the grid. I looked in the scoop after about 9 inches and a 10k 6g ring was shinning at me in the moonlight. This was a shock. It was out of place and it didn't sound like that type of target. The ring is pretty solid. I could not tell from the sound. One of my criticisms of the 800 is that it doesn't make heavier, more massive items louder. Larger items like aluminium cans detect over a much larger area but I don't get a sense of 'density' from the audio target signal. So, I guess the 17 is because the gold has more copper or silver to make it the 10k. It is a nice class ring. I'm still trying to find the owner. The other items in the picture all have a story too including the two silver dimes and two silver chains. I'll try to remember them if you ask me. Mitchel

Here is another WA nugget! http://www.foxnews.com/world/2018/09/21/massive-80g-gold-nugget-discovered-in-australia-by-retired-man-whos-been-searching-area-for-years.html Mitchel

Chris, You better get up there before it is all gone. Mitchel

Your little trip exceeds all the gold I've found in Nevada! Good looking 'rig' for staying out there. Mitchel

Where did you get that dime? Nice gold around it too. That means lots of holes had nuggets in them. Mitchel

One day or one half-day at a time for you now ... mate! Any one of us who had that long or half that long for our entire journey would be of an excited mind set and not already sad. I've got a feeling you'll be back ... but who will take you next? Mitchel