Condor's 2022 Australia Gold Adventure

[phrunt]

I really hope weather hasn't ruined his trip!

[Steve Herschbach]

It did not help. I left in the nick of time, steady rain started the day I left. That desert country there is just like here in Nevada, in that you’d best stay put once it starts raining. The terrain just melts into deep mud, with lots of flooding risk.

[Gerry in Idaho]

Hang in there Steve as you are just now getting the feel of the machine, it's sounds and the gold in their ground.  

Every time I go to a new area that has quite the soil change, it really does take some time to get acclimated (familiar) with the sounds the detector makes on that soil and the kind of gold at the depths it's best at.  Sometimes a site will take a few days to get the wrinkles out, but then the gold eventually comes and it starts getting easier.

When the 4 of us went some years back, all our gold was small up to 2.9 grams.  We ended up with over 100 nuggets and the biggest solid was 2 that weighed 2.9 grams and then my one specimen that was a few ounce.  Tougher hunting than most folks realize.

Good luck down the stretch..

[Condor]

Update:

We spent the past week prospecting a gold area with a history of multi ounce patches and bigger nuggets.   We made use of some fairly detailed geological maps and Google Earth to identify mineralized zones likely to produce gold.  Those resources in fact worked all to well because most of those places ended up hunted to death over the past 10 years.  We saw scrapes and dig holes in all but one of the areas we identified.  The gold in these areas was shallow enough that they were cleaned out by the GPXs and the GPZs long before we showed up.  We found 1 spot that was relatively untouched and found 2 very small patches in the zone that should have produced gold.  One patch produced 15 or so small nuggets, nothing over a gram.   The 2nd patch produced 6 nuggets for a little over 5 grams.  We gridded and expanded our search out to about 1/4 mile for no joy.

Every day we did a lot of walking and swinging with 1 mile loops through anything that looked like it could hold gold.  Mornings we cool and breezy,  afternoons warm and fly ridden.   Any little cut or scrape on hands or arms was the fly's favorite dinning delight.  Damned irritating for us lightweights. 

The quandary for anyone in our situation is whether to leave the known small gold 200 miles behind and go looking for lunkers. We hunted the small gold patch pretty hard, but we probably could have eked out another 2 or 3 grams a day with low and slow detecting with the Concentric coils. 

I think we made the right choice because I'd always look back and wonder what we might have done. 

The one bright spot was we met up with MadTuna and his faithful canine sidekick Kevin.  He was a most generous host and gave us the benefit of his local knowledge and history of gold producing patches.  

Well another adventure coming to an end and I'm sitting in the airport dreading 23 hrs of airports and airplanes to get home.   

I'll get the gold cleaned up and weighed when I get home.   The total is probably just over an oz total.   

[rvpopeye]

An OZ in Oz !

Good times !👍

[beatup]

Can't wait to hear some of the stories first hand this winter down in sunny yuma

[Gerry in Idaho]

Steve,  Here's the difference between you and so many others.  You just don't talk and dream it, like so many do.  You get out there and do it and make the memories for the rest to read/dream about.

No sitting in a rocking chair saying "I wish I would have done....."  I don't know what it is with the majority of folks, but they seem to come up with every excuse not to.  Glad my mind is not that way.  I'm about making them, not dreaming them.

Another adventure accomplished.  Well done my friend.

[mn90403]

Well Steve, another trip accomplished as Gerry says.  I'm sure you wanted more weight.  We all do.

The one bright side I can see is that just in case you have to smuggle in your gold in a body cavity it won't be as painful as several more ounces!

One of these days I'll see you in Yuma again.

Mitchel

[Condor]

Final Results 

134 total nuggets: 41.2 grams

10 biggest: 13.3 grams

Biggest: 2.8 (actually less, still needs more time in the acid)

10 Smallest: .3 grams total 

The Smallest were probably all found with the GPX 6000 and Coiltek 14x9 coil. 

However,  I  only used the 6k for 2 days.   There's a shit ton of tiny gold I found with the Z7k and Xcoil 17" Concentric.   

I had about 21 days of detecting after discounting the travel days and rain days.

Most of the gold came from the 2nd worked out patch containing small deep gold. The final 6 days were a calculated risk for making a move to find bigger gold and new patches.  

I talked to 2 Aussie prospectors who detect nearly full time.  A 5 gram a day average is considered successful, especially when you factor plenty of skunk days.  

Considering the time and cost, prospecting Australia reinforces our manta: "it's not the probabilities but the possibilities" that keep us on the hunt for gold.   

 

[davsgold]

very nice gold Steve, well done, plus you had safe trip which is always a bonus

cheers dave