Bering Sea Gold Dredger Expert Answers Questions

[AK_Au_Diver]

Since I'm one of the most experienced Nome dredgers on this forum, questions directed at me and my responses have inadvertently hijacked a few threads, some of which are otherwise long defunct. So I am starting this thread to try to consolidate where people can go to ask me open questions about mining offshore Nome, and where my answers can be easier for new people to find and read.

About me:
Andrew has been a Bering Sea gold dredger since 2006. With six years and over 1200 dive hours running his own six-inch, eight-inch, and ten-inch gold dredges offshore Nome, Alaska. Along with his mining partner, Andrew designed, engineered, built, and operated five gold dredges, including "The Edge" as seen on TV. Since the lease sale in September 2011, Andrew is now one of four team members running the largest and most successful suction dredge operation in Nome, operating an 18"-intake ROV suction dredge on over 3000 acres of offshore mineral leases within seven miles of the port of Nome. Always willing to help out new and wannabe miners, Andrew posts under the moniker “AK_Au_diver”. He can be reached for advice, opinion, reality checks, and fact checking. As there always is with gold mining, liars, cheaters, and scoundrels abound; be sure to always check and verify any opportunity, investment, and potential partnership.

 

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[AK_Au_Diver]

Nome update
June 6th, 2014

The ice went out May 18th, a few weeks earlier than typical the last few years, but later than 2008. The winter was warm and mild, as it often is when the L-48 has a harsh one.

The first barges have arrived, only a couple new dredges appeared to be on them. There is a distinct lack of activity around the harbor grounds and few dredges in the water. There are many dredges and surf crawlers that have not been touched this year, some were not touched last year either. The 10" dredge fleet is mostly back in the water and working. The Eroica started mining yesterday, the AuGrabber has splashed in, the Christine Rose is tented in dry dock getting it's hull painted, I didn't notice any of the other ones from the TV show but I don't know all their names.

Us and a couple of the larger commercial dredges are in the water and working, another just got in yesterday but are not working yet. One new one showed up, and word is that perhaps two more are on their way. All the others are diggers. Word is a couple more rov-style crawlers have undergone redesign and will be back this year; I won't classify them as commercial since they are so small.

It appears that the gold rush is over.

Harbor fees have gone up again; we paid almost $5k for our dredge and two skiffs. The new harbor assistant needs some training in customer relations; like all new people who think they are "authority figures" they will learn that they work for us, or they will be gone.

The weather has been mostly wet and cold. I see a couple tents on the beach, but it's hard to tell with binos from an anchored boat two miles away.

A few government/retired government busy bodies in Nome complaint about the "miners" in the letters to the editor and general whining; as if all the problems of this place were caused by 200 seasonal workers and not the poor policies they have enacted nor the 30 chronic inebriates that account for a huge portion of the city's budget.

I don't know where everyone else is, are they coming late or not coming? I've only seen a few new people so far.

 

[AK_Au_Diver]

So I take this to mean that you have a method of sampling, testing areas that look good and unless they meet
certain thresholds you move on. Do you have a lighter, more nimble sampling setup in addition to the main 18inch
dredge or is there some way to take a sample without shutting down for more than a couple of minutes?

We used to use an 8" dredge to do samples, but it's better to just sacrifice some time and use the actual machine to run for 15 or 20 minutes on an area we want to test, and see what comes up. Clean up the top 2' section of the box, dry and weigh it, to get a quantitative value for which to compare to other tests, normalized for the area or time that was covered. Sampling is one major improvement my design for a next generation system would improve upon. But really 20 samples for a 640 acre block tell us a lot.

It's hard to compare any method of sampling to the method of mining unless they are similar, like a 6" suction dredge could sample for a 10" suction dredge, but a 6" churn drill would be mostly useless. And the 18" makes a 40' wide swath in a mostly straight line, whereas a diver suction dredge will meander and follow the gold much better. So we move much more material but our average grade would be much lower than a diver 8" over identical ground.

 

[AK_Au_Diver]

Nome Update 7/15/2014

First big storm of the summer has hit Nome, expected to last a week, might be another storm right behind it.

Natural turbidity levels have been a problem for the divers for the past week, due I think to strong currents pulling up biomass from the bottom and murking out most people. Higher skilled dredgers have been able to use dive lights and "dredging by braille" to work.

A group of about six or seven long-time 6" dredgers have called it quits. Fed up with the poor gold, the unwelcoming atmosphere of the local government, and they are just getting tired of it. They sold off their dredges, equipment, and cabins/accommodations.

There are several dredges of various sizes for sale, some that have not been in the water yet this year, some not last year either. Even the infamous Randy Horne is selling off his stuff; I guess his scheme of having 4 to 6 investors/partners on a 6" dredge, that then has to hire divers, isn't enough of a money maker anymore. (I'm hoping that is because he has run out of people to scam, because they have started wising up to people who make big promises and don't deliver)

Several dredges have been doing well, these are mostly with seasoned crews. I am surprised that the 10" NorPac is not in the water this year, other 10" dredges of it's fleet are working. This is the large dredge that lost power and grounded on the beach last year, bending a shaft and other damage.

I've been here 3 months and we have about 25 days of dredging in so far, which is pretty close to a record for us. We are much bigger, by far the largest suction dredge in the fleet, so we often get a more days than the smaller guys.

The harbor has finally removed the stupid stand-off bumpers that didn't go low enough, thus pinning several boats under them every year during the fall low tides. Unfortunately they replaced them with these floating horizontal bumpers that don't let the boats get close enough to the ladders. In what harbor in the world have you ever seen them put bumper stuff along the steel walls? Normally boats bring their own bumpers, right?

There are a few dredges still being constructed, big diggers. One has been under construction for a couple years, the other since early June. There is word that another smaller version of the rov-style dredge I work on will be back this summer, after a rebuild or two; maybe they will be here in August, they are having serious problems with their buy-back crab boat, and lack of money because they spend lots of time building and not enough time mining.

The two excavator barges that jack off the water have been getting the most time in, but they have huge costs with payroll and upkeep. I hope they succeed, they put a lot of hard work into their operation, but their cost per ozt has to be kept low enough to be profitable. I've seen plenty of operations where their cost per ozt has been over $10,000; when successful ones are much lower, below the price of gold of course, around $600 maybe. That's about what it was for my 8" dredge, which was really slim when gold was under $800.

I did the math on my old 6" and 8" operations, and asked around. Suction dredging is the greenest way to mine, with a burn rate of about 4 to 10 gallons per ozt recovered.

Good Luck

 

[Oakview2]

Thanks for the updates, that salt water minning appears way to rich for my blood, I stick with the forrest fires, poison oak, meth zombies and overzealout Fish and Shame to waste my money on. Good health and good hunting.

 

[AK_Au_Diver]

Quick update: there are lots of dredges and accessories for sale, I see flyers and postings. I'm not sure how much of my 2009 advice still holds. Gold prices are much higher than then, but the smaller guys are getting fed up and leaving due to lack of production and better opportunities at home. This seems like more than normal, especially since there were so few new people to start with this spring.

By the time the port gets the new small docks installed on the west bank of the Snake, maybe next year, there may not be enough dredges left to fill them. Unless more big operations come in, or the 8" and 10" dredges that stay in the main harbor decide to park out there, away from the crowds. Well, I guess that is pretty likely, I think most of those guys would choose floating docks vs having to raft 3 deep on the walls. I think the residents of Belmont Point on the east bank will be glad to get the little dredges off "their" side.

 

[Prospector70]

Magnificent update! What a fun read, thank you for posting!
Questions:
Where is the pic of your gold?
How far down do you usually dive?
Best,

 

[AK_Au_Diver]

I just drove around the port dry dock area and count at least 20 dredges or dredge frames that have not been in the water this year. Most have no activity, about 5 are being worked on occasionally. There are at least 20 more in people's yards around Nome. The harbor looks surprisingly full, mostly because the largest dredges, expect two are currently in the inner harbor, including the 6th largest called the Christine Rose, and ours which is the 7th largest.

My avatar is a picture of some of my gold. It's my team's policy that we don't post pictures of the gold from the current operation online. It's bad enough that the rumors exaggerate our take by over 10x; we don't need more of those "one month's gold" being misreported as "one day's cleanup" which for some reason is a common error people make when observing operations of all sizes (just because we cleanup one month's gold in one day, does not make it ok to say we "got" that gold in one day).

Here are a couple old pictures from my 8" days, in 15 to 25 feet:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/...073741829.100006247801252&type=1&l=e6fa7df79d

We don't have divers anymore on my current operation, we operate in 40 to 70 feet water depths.

 

[Peyton Manning]

on the tv show only the pomerankes seem to run like a business.
how much gold does an outfit like yours average in a day?

 

[AK_Au_Diver]

If we won't show pictures, we certainly don't give numbers. I can say that they are a fraction of what you'll hear about us in Nome's miner bars. We don't figure anything by the day. The only reason I know how many days we mined last year is because the State requires that in our reporting, we keep track of mining hours.

I think we are in the top seven in both size and production; which are different lists, maybe having only 3 members in common (CR, us, and one other; other top producers are smaller 10" dredges with expert crews on good ground). I don't know everyone else's numbers, so I really can't compare. Even the numbers the TV show gives are inflated or deflated from the actual.

For gold production per crew-hour, I think us and the CR are in the top 3.

 

[Peyton Manning]

biggest nugget ever dredged?

 

[roadrunner]

That is one badass dredge.
Where did you come up with the pontoon wheel combo?
Looks like part of the Volkswagon thing.

 

[AK_Au_Diver]

The red 8" dredge? I designed and built that. Many 6" and 8" dredges are beach launched, so they have wheels permanently attached. They are pushed out to the water and yanked out by ATVs. They are slow in the water, but only have to travel 1/4 to 1/2 mile, vs the harbor dredges that have to travel several miles, at a minimum. I would have designed it with powered wheels and a more hydrodynamic form, but speed was not the main parameter, stability was, and fitting tightly into a 20' connex. Incidentally, don't use VW engines offshore, Kohler is way better. I sometimes wish I could build another 8" dredge, but there is not good money in building them for others because new people don't know the value of a good design and it's too easy to spend much less money on something that looks like it might work.

My biggest nugget is about 1/3 ozt. My partner on the 8" got a 1.1 ozt nugget, which is about the 5th largest I've heard of from offshore Nome. The largest being about 3.3 or 5.1 ozt. I don't have complete records or recollection, but I'm not too far off on any of these numbers.

 

[Prospector70]

Fascinating, thanks sir!

 

[KevinInColorado]

Fascinating, thanks sir!

Indeed, fascinating!

 

[ALewis]

Good read...thanks

 

[johnnysau]

Would like to get this question answered by somebody who has been on the ocean floor around Nome.
What type of rock is it on the ocean floor there - Serpentine !

 

[AK_Au_Diver]

I've spent over 1200 hours working on the bottom offshore Nome. What do you mean the type of rock?

There is bedrock, 80' deep or so, until you get over by the Cripple River. There is typically a hard mud layer, some call a "clay-pan" within 3 feet of the seafloor.

The rocks on the surface are normal rocks. The size to quantity distribution follows a standard hyperbolic cosecant function; sand sized number towards infinity, truck sized are very rare (infinity sized are almost non-existent). A guy on a 4" is moving rocks all the time. On a 6" almost all the time. On an 8" well over 1/2 the time. On a 10" maybe half the time. On our 18" a few need to be pushed out of the way, maybe 15% of the time is rock management.

Some rocks are round and smooth river rock style, but most are not wore much at all, just the edges and corners taken down.

As for composition of the rocks, I don't really know. I guess I just take them all for granite.

 

[KevinInColorado]

Groan! LoL
Are you just feeding us a bunch of schist?

 

[AK_Au_Diver]

Well, we are now back up one spot to being the 6th largest dredge platform in Nome, with the decommissioning of the JC, in its second year here. I wish he had let me use just $5M of what he spent on his Nome operation, I could have made it into a winner for him.

But that money to him means about the same as going on a week-long Alaska cruise would feel like to us.