I saw a bear the last time I went out here in Georgia. I smelled the bear then I saw it. I was in the middle of the Etowah when this happened. Take some bear spray with you. This is a must have from my experience.
I do not want to take this off topic but I prefer to carry a .44 as it takes care of bears and claim jumpers.[/QUOTE]
The area where I hunt would not permit guns. There are no claims other than leases on the Etowah or Chestatee to dredge. A gun could be used there. Other lands here are part of the Corp of Engineers or Federal Park System. As they say on the GPAA, lands are getting fewer and fewer for prospectors. That is especially true here in N. Georgia.
You can prospect under a bridge without any problems or go to parks without using motorized dredges. Other than that, you have to have a lease from the land owner. This is easy to do sometimes because hunting leases can not be given out any more because of residential housing going up everywhere here.
I have spent years finding a few hot spots that I can hunt that no one knows of and the land is owned by the parks in the County which could care less about what you do as long as you don't put in a dredge.
I have considered going to Alabama to dredge but finding an adequate partner to help is an iffy prospect. Most people want to prospect by dredge but are clueless about it and can get you killed. This is why I sold my dredge because I had to dredge by myself. I had idiots that didn't realize that I was underwater and turned the motor off. They were mad about the noise, not knowing that they were trespassing on my claim in a river. They can still have a canoe or whatever to go down the river as long as they don't get out of the boat on my claim or interfere with my dredge. But dummies are dummies and you can't change dumb thinking from my experience.
This is why I metal detect and just prospect with devices like the Gold Sucker.
Due to heavy rains here this year, I held off buying a nice electric pump highbanker for one of my hotspots. You can put the whole unit in a backpack. The batteries are the only real heavy thing you have to deal with. I will try it next season if the rains don't come so heavy next year. I am sure that more alluvial gold has been deposited in these hot spots so all is good. We needed the rain this year.
The object of the game is to move as much material as you can with a device that gets all the gold, including the flour gold. This is the bread and butter of prospecting. These new electric highbankers will replace the dredges where they can't be used as they used to be. Feeding the electric highbanker with material from my gold sucker is the best solution for silent prospecting in my opinion.
There is even a guy in Aussieland making electric dredges now. They are expensive but they look like they will work just like my first dredge, the Bazooka.
