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I thought it might be cool to start a new thread where you tell a fun or unique story accompanied with a pic, even if it was a long time ago. I have a handful of such ideas but chose this one: I had always hoped to find a real white quartz/ gold specimen. About a year ago I was hunting a small creek with my "SDC Birdshot Pro" where I had found many bedrock nuggets over a 6 to 8 week period. This day I was only getting bullets, birdshot and rusty square nails. I was starting to get burnt out with that and ready to move to a different area as I was hearing another "bullet sounding" target in alluvial creek gravel. I turned to leave but stopped and looked back at where the target was, and again listened to the target. I knew it was another bullet and I usually dig all my targets. But again I turned to go, again stopped and looked back and just stood there staring down. Finally, I sighed then bent down and had the target in the first scoop. My eyes went wide as I chastised myself for nearly making a rookie bone head mistake. It's not very big but for me it's a treasured little piece.

My buddy and I have been looking at a promising spot on Google Earth for the past few weeks so we decided to give it a go this weekend. We started early on Saturday morning and had to wait out the rain for a while as we gazed down this monstrous canyon that didn't look that monstrous on Google Earth. No shrinkage here. We did "the hike" which turned in to a death march and didn't even turn our detectors on . After braving the heat and being tired and hungry from our "hike" we decided to go re-visit an old area that always gives up a dink or two so that our effort wasn't a total bust. We both scored three for the afternoon. My buddy had visited another nearby spot on Friday afternoon after he got done with work and he scored three there as well. The only positive that came from "the hike" was that we spied some other good looking country (not in the bottom of a huge canyon)and decided to go there and check it out this morning. Now, lesser (smarter) men would have stayed home and got a massage after "the hike" but not us. And it's a good thing that we are not that smart. In just a few hours this morning I scored fourteen and my buddy another three! So, our weekend total was twenty six. I swung my SDC and he his GPX5000 with a "Sadie" coil. Fun in the Arizona sun. Here are some pics of my take... My buddy did a careful excavation of this one. It shows just how stuck they can become in the bedrock. Good luck. Dean

Hi, I just returned from a ten day trip in the Gasgoyne area of Western Australia. The first seven days were spent going over new ground patch hunting without any luck then ground I know has produced for the bread and butter gold. There is over 50 bits the largest being four grams and a few nice specimens.

I just posted this to the AZO forum. Let see if I can do it again... We went to the micro-nugget gulch for a few hours this weekend to clean it up. We both were swinging our Minelab units. Me the SDC and my buddy his GPX-5000 tipped with a 6" Coiltek coil. The SDC is made for this kind of hunting and the 5000 with this coil is super sensitive to the small gold. Started out a bit warm but got much nicer as the sun got lower. Some may think of this type of hunting as tedious(it is)but it really sharpens your detecting skills. It forces you to slow way down and listen for the slightest change in the threshold. A good pair of head phones is essential. The wildlife was out as well. We saw some Mule deer and met this guy... Look very close as he has great camo. Can you see him? A beautiful and deadly Mojave Rattle Snake. Snake guards would have done no good as he is hip height on the edge of the inside bend of the gulch. Thankfully, he was not in a bad mood, as I didn't see him until I stood up from digging a target about three feet away! He would not rattle and we could not get him riled up. He just wanted to be left alone so we obliged him and let him be and moved on up the gulch. As the guardian of the gold he didn't do a very good job because we scored these little guys.... first few (combined). My total take. I didn't get a pic of the final total but I think it was 14(?). My first target of the day was a perfect signal on the SDC. A nice mellow gold tone. I thought to myself, "first gold, YES"! Instead, this is what gave the nice tone... Very strange for the SDC as it usually doesn't sound off on hot rocks and if it does it gives a different tone. Plus, there aren't many hot rocks in this area and they don't look like this. It appears to be a large piece of Hematite. It is not magnetic. Weird for this place. Another fun trip with my buddy hunting micro-nuggets. Dean

As the title suggests thought I'd share a picture of a nice 2 ounce find I made recently here in WA with my GPZ. Ground was quite salty so was using the unit in Manual GB mode using the Ferrite to ground balance often, got about an ounce of tiny prickly stuff right on the surface about 50 meters away, can only assume this guy came off the original source many hundreds of meters up and a long time of weathering ago. JP

I just thought I would share with you, a very pretty find that a friend of mine found in a very pounded area with his ZED. He is not one to get on or post on the forums, but gave me the OK to do so. This prize is a 24 DWT. crystallization gold piece that has obviously not traveled far from the source. Enjoy.

It was a very rainy weekend in AZ.so we used it to our advantage. It was nice and cool and the washes had been flowing. My buddy purchased a GPX5000 and wanted to give it a swing. Chris at AZO set him up with a Doc's Power Pack Kit and a 12X7 Nugget Finder coil and some NF swag. Chris has a great special on this gear going right now. Very nice set up. It worked very well as he found a nugget both Saturday and Sunday with his new 5000. I spaced getting pics of his gold for the weekend:(. Sunday was cool and beautiful after all the rain so we headed out to one of our spots to give it a go. I used my SDC and Steve his 5000. He went one way and I the other. After a short swing on a hill side that had given up gold in the past, but was being stubborn on Sunday, I decided to move down in to the wash where the Old Timers had thrown everything out of the wash to expose the bedrock which consists of Schist and white clay. As I get to the exposed area I look down and see this little guy just waiting for me.... (Dead center) Cool. First gold of the day by eye ball. I fire up the SDC and just start to swing when I spy another one stuck in the clay just a foot away! Eyes two. Detector zero. That score didn't last long as the SDC started to hit on the micro nuggets every few feet. What a blast! It was starting to cloud up and I could hear distant lightning in my head phones. Steve put away his 5000 and came over to see what I was up to just as I was digging number five. He watched as I scored another and then hit another that was so small I had trouble getting it in the scoop and became frustrated and abandoned it to search for more cooperative ones. He asked if he could give it a go with the SDC and away he went. He found another five or six and even went back and managed to get that stubborn one that I had abandoned in the scoop. The SDC is deadly on the small stuff! Here is a pic of the seven I found... Nothing of size but beats the skunk any day. Dean

We have had more monsoon season odd weather. Rained yesterday and cloudy and cool today. We'll take it. Time for more detecting. Went back to attack some more brush area of my cousins property. Detected With fors gold for about an hour before detecting first piece of gold. Then 10 seconds after that piece found another. Then it took awhile to find 3rd and 4th piece. Nokta pointer also . Complimented the fors gold nicely. All in all it was a nice low 80's degree day and 1.5 dwt of gold to take home. Hopefully we will get more cool temps this summer. Good luck!

Working in a new area away from gold workings. Got one subgrammer after doing, probably 50 hours in small creeks, enough to wet the interest slightly, so resorted to detecting the gentle slopes that were strewn with rough quartz. Two more subgrammers than a 6.67 grammer ( all smooth but no smooth wash thus elluvial) but the three pieces separated by 1/2 k or so on different slopes but in a line at approx 90 deg to the mapped fault line. Encouraging stuff but very frustrating, time shows that only a small % of these finds turn into anything more than diesel returns, guess its the lure that drives us in this crazy hair pulling passion. One big positive in those hours only 2 other signals, one disappointing signal that was 99.9% "sure" to be gold till at a metre or so depth a bloody horseshoe not the 10 ozer of expectations.

I went detecting with a couple of louts and a lady last weekend with the intention of showing off my innate an finely honed detecting skills. The other two louts hand exactly the same plan. But- I had a secret weapon. My Gold Sniffing Dog! However the other two louts had exactly the same thing except THEY BOTH CHEATED! One lout brought two Gold Sniffing Dogs but the other lout really broke the rules an brought a highly modified Gold Sniffing Dog. It was built with it's nose operating at no more than 1" above the ground at all times (the entire dog was no taller than 6" above the ground). Well at the end of the day none of us three louts had anything at all to boast about, laying the blame on the danged dogs. Oh! I almost forgot the lady. She found 3 very pretty little nuggets with her 2300 and without a Gold Sniffing Dog. My forgiving nature will not allow my to mention any names. P.S. A picture of a Gold Sniffing Dog can be seen accompanying posts by Strick.

Back almost 30 years, was out on day trip with my young fellow (6 or 7 years old) having lunch at vehicle when I noticed he fed his half eaten sandwich to our family dog (habit he`d been caught at the kitchen table on a few occasions) So I gave him a clip under the ear and read the riot act to him. He walked off with the huffs, along a recently pushed haul road the local alluvial miner had pushed. Came back 10 minutes later with the above 43 grammer, he`d eyeballed sunbaking on the haul road. Well what could I say, here`s this young fellow just out of nappies, a 43grammer in his hand, me with latest detector and bugger all. He did it to me again with the GPZ couple of days ago, but I`m not going to tell that embarrassing story, too much pride, plus I`ve the sulks.

Paul, I read something on another thread ... i am going to have some cardiac surgey that weekend in St. Helenas. Does that mean you found a big nugget? (I wanted to start a good rumor about you.) Maybe you are 'assisting' in a surgery? If not you take it easy and get well soon. Mitchel

Hello Woke up this summer morning to a surprise. Clouds and sprinkles. Without a doubt it was a chance to go detecting. Went back to my cousins prop. And hit the area that we left off last time. Detected 4 pcs with fors gold and nokta pointer. Found 1 little piece in iron patch. Cleared up and back to hot sun by 11 am. But managed to get 2.5 dwt on an unexpected detecting trip. My partner did good with her gpx and coiltek camo elite and nabbed a couple deep pieces. Now going back to our lovely hot weather again. Time to head to the coast. Everyone have a great up coming 4Th of july

The "old" 3500 can still find em with the best of them. Here's proof... My buddy is deadly with his 3500. It will find them as small as the SDC will.

Just a reminder to you nugget hunters dont throw your hot rock's away, these pesky red rocks were showing up where i was working in pocket veins. I was using a GB2. There were red, grey,black, rocks all in this same area,all had gold in them. Being new to this i almost pitched these rocks but then decided i would take them home and look later,glad i did I soaked them in acid and they all had gold. I had been finding good visible gold here and it never looked like these oddball rocks that kept getting in the way of my new find. I know someone (i wont mention names) that had found these pesky hot rocks also around a deep deep mineshaft and he was working around and finding visible gold and kept pitching the red ones down the shaft out of the way. After i showed him my red rocks cleaned of minerals he was very disappointed that he had been throwing all his gold away. I keep everything that im not sure of now,hope this keeps a little more gold in your pocket. RICK.

At the end of May I got out for what has become an annual trip. It has been getting harder to get out and dredge with my 6" so now it has become about once a year during summer leave. I also purchased a SDC this last winter. It's hard to detect in AK in the winter so it would really be the first time out with it. My plan was to detect for the first few days and then dredge. I headed north to where I had found nuggets before. After a long trip and some rest I hit creek. The SDC sounds almost exactly like the GP extreme to me. As soon as I got going I got a good signal and dug a nugget. I thought lucky, so after detecting all around the immediate area with nothing else I moved down about 20 feet into a hole that someone had dug and got another signal which turned out to be another nugget. Now I was getting excited. I few minutes later and only two feet away I got another signal which also was a nugget. By this point I was supper excited. The detector kept chattering over the pile so I panned it and the small piece was in there. Over the next day I raked and gridded the whole area with nothing. Through the whole time I only dug 5 pieces of trash. With no more gold I headed out for the dredging grounds which is a whole other story. The bottom picture is the hole where the nuggets came from.

I just got back yesterday afternoon from a three day trip out to the gold fields of Northern Nevada. It was warm, but not too bad for the first 2 days (around 90) but it warmed up into the mid 90s on the third day and it is supposed to be above 100 for the next few days (So I am glad to be home in the air conditioning). Steve was out there with me for the majority of the trip. Neither of us got over any gold at all on the last day, but I had good luck the first two days. I got 13 nuggets for a total of 10.9 grams, or just a bit more than 7 pennyweight. No serious patches, sometimes it just seems like the gold out there has just been scattered randomly over a wide area. The largest nugget looks water worn, but the rest are jagged and have not traveled far. The GPZ and SDC both worked fine out there. I used the SDC in a trashy area where I was able to pinpoint and remove a zillion little pieces of steel window screen that had been blown around the area by the wind. For me, its just faster to pinpoint those little trash bits and remove them with the SDC. Next time out I will have a magnetized rake and use that to pre-treat the area for surface iron. In the less trashy areas where the depth and greater coverage was helpful, I used the GPZ.

Here are some recent finds from the last couple of Saturday outings. SDC nuggets. My buddy's nuggets using his 3500. These are this afternoon's X-Terra finds from a mining town that was established in the late 1800s. I believe that these are parts from a clock. All found within a small area. There is more of it I'm sure but I ran out of day light. Was really hoping for an old coin (aren't we all)but it didn't happen today. TONS of junk! I'm slowly learning what the X-Terra is telling me. I see why a small 6" coil would come in handy. Every swing hit multiple targets. I found two sides of an ornate wood stove that are awesome but couldn't carry them back to the truck in the dark. So I stashed them for next time. The clock gears appear to be brass(?). Starting to have some fun with the X-terra. Good luck. Dean

Did some detecting yesterday with the GPZ in a Hydraulic pit in California. Dug a lot of bullets and square nails, but also got this guy, a 2.5 gram nugget. It was surprisingly deep, around 9 inches.

I tell you being retired and digging gold is like work! One day someone will invent a metal detector on wheels and will dig your holes as you sit under a shade tree listening to which tone to push the dig button...lol. I'm starting to think, I don't have Gold Fever...I have Tone Fever! I love hearing the perfect nugget tone on my GPZ, it music to my ears! I should start leaving a few, just to swing over them to brighten my day...but, I do have a couple of Daughters in College and I have a need of a cold brew in the frig, so I'll toss them in the beer fund poke! Until the next hunt LuckyLundy

Here is a bit of gold I have got on a couple recent trips to the northern Nevada goldfields - Been a really wet last 6 weeks or so up this way in Northern Nevada. There were times I was hearing several lightening strikes a minute in my detector. The total weight for this gold is about ten grams, or roughly 1/3rd of an ounce. The bigger pieces were found with the GPZ, while the smaller stuff, mostly to the right side of the photo, was taken with the SDC 2300 - both very definitely have their place for the types of detecting I do. I've not always been able to do a full day recently - I had rain shortened days where I had to sit in my car and wait out a storm, etc. and some partial days that were spent with some time prospecting but also some time driving back and forth to the gold fields and later returning home. I'd say this gold represents the equivalent of about 5 full days of prospecting. I wish I could claim the biggest piece was some faint warble of a signal that I had the talent and skills to hear and identify, but it was a loud booming target less than an inch deep that any metal detector could have heard. When it boomed through my earphones I was sure it was trash, but I dug it and in much of northern Nevada there is not a lot of trash. The second swing of my pick a dirt clod flipped over and the nugget was shining back at me. Its still out there, it just takes some work, persistence and a bit of luck - and sometimes patience while waiting for the thunderstorms to stop.

I stumbled across this today. What fun to look over this fellows shoulder. Hope he does not mind my sharing it with you.

Got lucky in a few way's today. I was supposed to have a dentist appointment so i got off work at noon. Ends up the dentist called my wife and changed the appointment date. So i got a few hour of detecting in and scored my first gold in awhile. Off on my Zuma to find some Gold! I headed into an upper fork of the same stream i was hunting in the snowy pics i posted. Shortly after i arrived i noticed an area that had scoured from the recent Super Cell down pours. The scour was small but it exposed a little bedrock just along the edge of an old tailing pile. The tailings split the stream into a very uniform braid. I had found pieces down stream under the edge of the old tailings therefor i dove in and tossed some boulders and moved some dirt to expose an area a few meters long by a half meter wide. With my first pass of the coil i heard a faint warble nearly like old lead but a bit different. Hmm i thought with a smile. In many locations i'd have thought lead but i had never found any lead in this stream and very little in the entire area for that matter. After afew swings of the coil and waves of the hand i was smilen big at a little rough nug. Sweet! Into my poke and back at it. I focused on a spot just above this piece that showed a big boulder resting on the bed rock and as i passed it seem a mellow sweet signal. Awesome its under the boulder and very unlikely anything but gold. Needless to say i tore that boulder out and their underneath about 3 inches lay a beautiful dwt piece. Made my day and broke my little dry spell. Super stoked i continued on but only came up with a few nail tips and a piece of very thin wire. All of these were a little above were i found the gold. After i pulled the big piece i burrowed into the bank more but had no more signals. I'll let her rest until i want to return and dig. This weekend i'll be out to find the new patch I've been determined to find. The place i'm going is a 3 mile each way march so i'll be gettn in early and out late to spend as much time as possible swinging my good old SDC. The little rough piece was .1 dwt and the big one as i said above 1 dwt exactly. Good Luck AjR

IN GOLD WE TRUST

I was able to get away over the weekend to check out one of my old patches here in AZ with the SDC 2300. This particular spot has been really good to me over the years. It has spit out tons of nuggets, but most have been small & under a gram. A few friends and I have worked it hard using VLFs and the newer PI machines like the GPX 5000 and 4500. My last trip there with the 5000 only netted me two tiny ones, so I thought it would be a good spot to test out the SDC. This machine doesn’t penetrate as deep as the GPX, but what it lacks in depth it more than makes up for in sensitivity. A couple hours of hunting produced 14 nuggets; most of which came from places I know I had scrubbed before. Total weight was around two grams. For small, shallow gold in highly mineralized dirt, the SDC definitely tops my list. Here's the loot..