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We had another cloudy morning in Yuma so I got out the 7k and went out to the zone I had found the better class of nuggets this spring. Temps were in the low 90's with about 60 percent humidity so I was forced to slow way down which obviously paid off. I ran the 7k maxed out with my earphones plugged in and the threshold barely audible. I had the luxury of knowing the area had gold, very little trash and very few hotrocks. I was swinging low and slow, overlapping the swings by half. I investigated any disturbance that made the threshold go steady from its warble. The big specimen was out of the main wash up on a bench and just barely registered a disturbance in the threshold. I kicked out some of the bigger rocks and still barely got a warble. So I dug off 2 inches about a foot square area and the tone was definite. The nugget was ultimately down about 14 inches on a layer of old grey clay. It makes your heart beat a little faster when you dig down and see that clay layer, not much trash makes it down that far. I seriously doubt I would have heard that nugget in my normal prospecting mode relying solely on the external speaker. Crappy weather has made me slow down and be satisfied with covering less ground thoroughly. The second nugget was up in the side bank of a cut in the main wash. With maxed out Insanely Hot settings a nugget that small screams at 6 inches.

I woke up to a fierce thunderstorm, rained for about 30 minutes at my house, so I decided to take advantage of the cloud cover and swing the old 7000. A balmy 84 degrees with a decent breeze. The 7000 hasn't been fired up for about 6 weeks and I was surprised at all the noise she makes in the Insanely Hot settings. I eventually took the threshold way down so that I could tolerate the reorientation. I knew it was too hot and humid to do any real prospecting so I concentrated in an area that produced a bunch of small stuff this past winter. I maxed out the settings and plugged in my earphones, swinging low and slow, just looking for a repeatable threshold break. I found the first one about 20 ft from the truck. After I concluded that it wasn't surface trash I went back to the truck and got out the XP Deus to see how it would do in hot ground on an undug target. I used the Goldfield program with no discrimination. The Deus couldn't find the target at about 4 inches deep. The 7000 was quite definite on the target, so much so that I thought it was small iron trash. I kept digging and scraping and running the Deus over the hole, still nothing. I dug out about 6 inches and ran the 7000 over it, the target was out, so I went back to the Deus. It sounded off on the nugget in the pile, but needed a pretty brisk sweep speed to get there. The reactivity was at 2. No low and slow for something this small. The 2nd nugget was the smallest and maybe 2 inches down in an old Dozer furrow. Again the 7000 signal was quite definite, but the Deus got nothing on the undug target. I dug out the signal and the Deus hit on a Hot Rock in the pile, but had real trouble hitting on that tiny nugget. I'll remain cautiously optimistic that the alleged new coil option will improve the Deus performance on small gold. In the meantime, I'm going to keep playing with the Deus and learning coin/relic hunting. I've cleared my home schedule and going to head North next week. I hope to be out to N. Nevada by the 2nd week of August. I've got to get out of this ferocious sun and heat in Sunny Yuma. Maybe I'll see some of you boys out there.

I always like when people post their recent finds, it motivates me to go out and find my own. Had some time to do a short hunt this am near Johnnie NV. Walking a small drainage with the 8 inch coil on my ATX I find this 1.7 g specimen about 4 inches down, not even on bedrock. It was underneath a shoe sized rock. Clear strong signal. Detected the majority of the wash for nothing else. I am notorious for finding single nugget washes lol. Was still happy to find this, lots of character. Chris Closup

Got out for a half day hunt to Gold Basin early before getting to hot. Found a small nugget and a puzzle piece meteorite that I put back together, as shown in picture. Enclosing a video also... The early mornings sure are a perfect 80 degrees, but once that sun comes out the temp rises fast... Dave.

Young couple called me three weeks ago to help find a lost ring in Pueblo Lake. He had just purchased the 2K+ ring and propsed a week earlier and when they were tying up their boat he had his fiancee take off the ring and give it to him for safekeeping. Of course he dropped it in about four feet of water. Myself and several other club members have been searching for it ever since and today was my lucky day. He's now out of the doghouse and wedding bells will ring in the future. Yes, he offered a wad of money but I asked him to "pay it forward" and help somebody in the future. I was using the AT Pro in "zero" mode and iron discrination of "35". The AT Pro and the Garrett Carrot make a nice combination for water hunting.

Hi everyone, as you can see my name is Dan and I live in Darwin Australia . I went out with my new Garrett ATX yesterday for my first go at finding my fortune on a local quiet beach. After an hour or so of playing around with it I started getting tabs, bottle tops, nails etc which gave me confidence it was actually working ! . I found my very first coin and was well pleased but the very next swing was very faint. As I'm new to this I thought I'd dig everything and get used to the machine. At ten inches out popped my very first gold thing !! I think it's a ladies wedding band, it weighs nearly six grams and is 18 carat.it also has two names and a date inscribed in it , so being the sentimentalist I am il try to find the person who lost it. Probably worth so much more to them than me for scrap.

I've been collecting an impressive assortment of trash the last few months, but the only gold I have been able to count on has been from running my sluice in the creek as my gpz has been fruitless for some time. I was up in the high country for a few days last month, the first day and a half were looking pretty much the same with nothing to show for my time. I decided to pack up from where I had been hunting and drove out to see if gold miner Strick had set up camp as I knew he would be heading up for a hunt for a few days. When I got to his camp Chuck was out for a hike, so l chatted with Lisa for a few minutes and then headed to an old patch to see if my luck had changed. i had fired up zed and had been hunting for about 15 minutes when I picked up a really clean short sweet high low tone when I ran the coil alongside a large tree that had fallen down and partially decayed. I began digging up the target and at about only 3 inches down I spotted a promising lump as in the distance I could hear the approach of prospector strick's utv approaching my location. I hurriedly snatched my prize from it's hiding place, dusted off the dirt and dropped it into my container just in time to show it off to my fellow prospectors. my only conclusion is that an important part of a successful hunt must include at least a short visit to camp Strick, as I went back up the following week for 4 days and was not able to get some luck to rub off on me and lived the skunk yet again, despite destroying two tires on my wife's car the first day, which has worked in the past finding gold.

Beat the potential skunk Brian was dealing with on his previous post too, but one hour earlier!? Was slipping and sliding on a steep slope all day, but nothing but square nails and a bit of lead.....then at about 3, as I was making my way back up, I got another target. Moved some rocks and dug, figuring it's going to be my Zillionth square nail....so I looked up to the sky, sweat stinging my eyes, and asked the Gold God for just a baby piece of CA gold to start my nugget-hunting vacation with. And Holy Crap! This beautiful rough CA slug plops into my hand! Biggest I ever found! So said my thanks and called it a day(after checking my hole for possible little brothers, of course! lol)

We decided to detect the high country with the idea that we would be out of the smoke from the Trailhead fire that was burning near Foresthill. We arrived at our destination with clean air and blue skies, yahoo! I started the day hunting the trashy areas with my discriminator. After a few hours and only digging bullets, I was getting a little worried about the possibility of a skunk. Next, I brought out the GMT. This is my anti-skunk machine! I detected an area that I knew had an abundant of small gold. Again, after a few hours, nothing but hot rocks and one bird shot. Wow, not looking good and now the smoke is beginning to fill the valleys. I really don’t enjoy the two hour drive home when I don’t have any gold in the poke. Finally I decided to finish the day with my 5000 and the Sadie coil. Normally I like to hunt with a large coil, but I had left that coil in my car which was parked in Truckee. So I detected my way down the mountain finding two nails and half a bullet, about 6" deep. It was now 4:00pm, and time to head back up the hill when I came across an area with a lot of small quartz rocks. I thought to myself this area looks really good. So I began detecting the quartz and immediately I got a huge signal by a tree. I thought to myself, must be a nail since it’s so loud. I scraped the ground with my boot and the target moved, so I knew it should be an easy recovery and probably trash. Well, after an embarrassing recovery that took way to long, I had a 6.9dwt quartz and gold nugget in my hand. The nugget was basically on the surface and had two friends below it. I detected the area only to find one square nail, but I think there is definitely more gold there. The hike up the canyon is never fun but the drive home was great and the wifee was super happy. I whinked the gold for three days and now the nugget weights 6.3dwt, but it’s much prettier now.

Just back from the Nome, Alaska area. Hard work (low and slow - listen carefully - focus) and little luck yielded a nice range of specimen nuggets. The were a few areas with hot rocks but most spots had acceptable slightly-mineralized soil conditions for my GPZ and GB2. It did seem I dug a lot of rusty 3-4" nails in the 24-36" range but only one nugget this deep. Does the GPZ and other detectors pick up rusty nails deeper than nuggets? Is there something about their shape and electrical/magnetic properties that make them easier targets?

I think we're getting close to the source vein. All down about 18 inches in the clay layer. Yes, Northern Calif. and whispers of target sounds.

I don't get a chance to post a lot as my time spent prospecting has decreased for various reasons. That being said when I get a few hours out and about I'm happy to find anything at all. My best days have been around a pennyweight of dinks. Well the last time out happened to be a little better than usual. My partner and I were checking out some ground way off the beaten path of typical gold country and we found a nice little patch. This is about 4 hours work between the two of us. Keep swinging! There is still good stuff out there and I am now a true believer of that.

Keep digging and grinning! Until the next hunt LuckyLundy

Well we made a hike out to another old haunt of ours with our new Metal Detectors to give it a go! Well the new toys did find a handful of nuggets our old GPX's and GB2's couldn't hear. Nice cool day in the woods, until the next hunt! LuckyLundy Well still having a problem with my little videos...here a couple pictures

I just got back from 5 days out hunting at Rye Patch with a group of friends. One of our group snagged 18 little dinks with his 2300. A couple other guys also got one or two. Luckily, I managed to score the best but they are not your usual Rye Patch nuggets. The large one has quartz attached. Out of the hundreds of nuggets I've found out there over the years, I've only seen two others with quartz. It's very rare. The other is not heavy, but paper thin. Again, not your usual pieces from there. Both were about 10 inches deep and gave faint signals. No chevrons or any other marks that would distinguish them as unique to Rye Patch.

Summer has arrived here in Sunny Yuma by the Sea. Predicting 110 by next weekend. I got out at sunup this morning in the same spot from the other day. I found these two in a small side gully. Hiking back to my truck I saw a nesting nighthawk and took a quick photo of her eggs. Wide open terrain, two eggs in the shade of a greasewood bush. She tried to lure me away with the old wing dragging trick.

I went back out this morning and changed up my settings some. I added some low smoothing and switched from Normal to General, maxed out Sens. The heavier nugget was in the side of the wash. I missed it yesterday because the coil needed to be turned on its edge to shoot sideways not up and down. I could never have done that with the GPX series because of nearby powerlines and military jet traffic. That kind of EMI would have overloaded the audio on GPX. The second biggest nugget I didn't miss yesterday, I just chose not to dig it like a idiot. It was up in the roots of a bush covered in blow out gravel from a shallow waterfall. I heard it clearly yesterday but thought it was trash from the blow out and hung up in the bush. Naturally that was before I had found the bigger gold so I was still in prospect mode and not in dig it all mode. I've only been doing this for 20 yrs, one of these days I'll learn to be a little more proficient.

As most of you know, I moved back to Sunny Yuma last year and I am literally 30 minutes from known placer locations. Unfortunately, these locations are no big secret and everyone and his dog have detected or drywashed these areas. I'm out there at least 4 days a week for 3 to 4 hrs at a stretch. I have hammered these areas dozens of times and lately have been down to finding a few tiny crumbs for my effort. I've been running the Insanely Hot settings just to eke out a few tiny bits and keep my interest up. I've reconciled this effort with the fact that I'm getting my morning exercise, fresh air and glimpses of desert wildlife. I consider it a successful week if I can find 2 grams, the price of a tank and a half of gas at $2.05 a gallon AZ prices. This morning I drove out to one of my least hammered areas, probably only been through there 6 times this year. I endeavored to stay out of the big washes and gullies and focus on the hillsides with short narrow washout zones that might concentrate some gold. They certainly concentrate .22 slugs, but .22s are mostly near surface targets and I don't waste too much effort. I had managed one tiny bit and noticed a gully that I had avoided in the past because the overburden gravels are too deep. I decided to give it a go and was surprised that at a higher elevation this gully flattened out and meandered between the hillsides totally hidden from normal view. No drywash tailings and no dig holes in a zone that had produced gold for me in the past. Obviously my photos reveal that there was indeed gold in the upper portion of that gully. The biggest nugget is 4.3 grams and was down 21 inches as measured on my pick handle. I was running wide open Insanely Hot settings, HY/Normal, Sens 20, smoothing off, threshold erratic at 21. The nugget was wedged up against a huge block of granite that prevented me from getting a decent swing of the coil. Several times the signal disappeared and the only way I could reacquire it was raising the coil about 4 inches above the hole and sweeping the coil briskly. You can't trust the Super D coil when poking it down into tight spots on a deep target, it really needs some side to side movement to be at its best. I don't think it was ground balancing the signal out, just not enough movement. So, a successful morning and I'm covered on gas for 4 more weeks, but summer is almost here and I imagine I'll work my way up to N. Nevada. I expect I'll see some of you boys up there soon.

The older I get the more I hate hot weather! So we headed out to find a few spots in the high country for this Summer hunts. We found a few spots, that will receive more of our attention during the hot months. Until the next hunt LuckyLundy

Steve and I got out to do a bit of prospecting recently - it wasn't the most productive trip we've ever had, though I have done worse. Sometimes you do well and sometimes not. When exploring around and searching for new places, you never know what you will find - nice gold or not much. More often than not exploration leads to slim pickings. Its just hard to say until you give it a try. However, exploring around is important as every patch plays out and the cream is taken, so its necessary to keep searching to find good spots. That's the essence of prospecting, searching for that next great patch. We found at least one place that needs further investigation. I ended up with right at one pennyweight or 1.5 grams. Took this photo with my dumb camera, so no GPS coordinates attached. Won't mention how I cleaned the dirty nuggets up or removed the caliche from them as that caused a minor bit of hard feelings last time.

I decided to take a break from hunting for a new patch and went back to an older one I gave up on too soon. Spent half the day digging, raking and detecting. I ended up with 2.6 g. Mostly with White's GMT with small coil. (Great on small gold) At one point I dug off the overburden and went over ground with ATX no signal, then went over with the GMT and got a strong signal...? So I went back to the ATX and found the signal...not slow and low enough. Big learning point...lesson learned. The 2 bigger ones were 0.7g each. Definitely headed back to this wash. (Still want to find a Virgin patch though) Chris

First off, I'm not too adept at posting/computer stuff, so hopefully won't botch this up! Trying to post some pics from my prospecting trip! Had a great time exploring more out of the way areas of GB... the quad is a must! Camped on Mike and Jerry's property off Greggs Hideo In spite of some rainy days, my hunting partner Jim and I were able to get out and find some gold! Here's my total for the trip: Close up of my "Personal Best" so far, a nice 6.8 grammer....this was found in a remote narrow wash about 8" deep....gave a strong reverse signal

Thanks for all the kind words. When I'm not out detecting I live vicariously for other people's prospecting adventures. I'm glad we have an active forum to share this hobby. I played around with my camera and photo editing to try and get a close up of the rock matrix on the nugget. Still not so good but maybe some of you experts can figure it out and give me an idea where to look for the vein. The nuggets I found last year all had the same matrix attached. There are hundreds of quartz veins in the area, but I haven't found any gold with obvious quartz attached.

Robin and I, had another fun filled hunt at Rye Patch! I've often been asked if I'd like to find a single one ounce nugget or dozens to equal and ounce. Well, I like big nuggets just like the next prospector! But, I'd rather find dozens of nuggets to equal that ouncer...more smiles is my reply! There are countless great placers in our Western States. If your close to one, spend the time to learn it. It will start to give you its secrets and your poke will grow to that one ounce mark, one nugget at a time! Enjoy, this hobby of ours, picked up crystals to share and watch out for then buzz tails, we got one on this trip! Until our next hunt LuckyLundy