The worlds best prospecting tools.(Long post)
August 11, 1998 at 17:29:31
Last weekend I once again played host to one of Doug Stone's metal detecting tours. Only a dozen people this year but beautifull weather and still plenty of gold on our Great Northern claims.
I made the same deal as last year; free entry and they could keep all the gold as long as they flagged their finds and presented them at the evening inspections and weigh in. I also offered a small platinum coin as a prize, to anyone who found gold in a reef.
Last year we ended up with a beautifull little 6 oz/ton gold reef from the groups efforts. They didn't actually find the reef, but detected a couple of small bits ten metres from it. A mate of mine eventually found it when he saw gold shining from it's outcrop!
Things started slowly with a few small bits and one nugget of 23 grams. On Sunday I decided to take the group to some virgin ground three km south along strike. They started detecting on a quartz covered ridge fifty metres from the road and to my great surprise, the first nugget (2 gm) turned up within half an hour.
A couple of hours later they had fourteen nuggets with the biggest at 5 grams. Despite my constant urging (and the Pt coin!) none of them could find gold near the reefs. So I took a great technological leap backwards to my panning dish. I took one gravel sample from the foot of the ridge where most of the nuggets were found and one from the top of the ridge where I believed the slightly worn nuggets were coming from. The pan showed one speck from the bottom and THREE from the top of the ridge. All I have to do now is sample the reefs and find the right one!
The virgin patch had the group fired up and they never looked back. By the end of the weekend they had found over five ounces of nuggets and located two more good areas of virgin gravel for me. More importantly, they have increased the Great Northern's strike length by one kilometre. That is something that could not be achieved by over one hundred years of prospecting by numerous individuals and several of Australias biggest mining companies.
So once again the metal detector and panning dish demonstrate that they are the best prospecting tools in the business. My portable sampling mill also comes a close third. Good luck to all!
Dave
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