Hi all, back in the 50 60's I formed a Construction Diving company and owned it for 19 years finally selling out to a couple of ex NZ Navy divers. I took on a job with and old college mate, selling heavy engineering equipment. I became friendly with one of my customers who dabbled with building jet boats. He invited me to spend a long weekend with him at the Aorere River in the south Island of NZ. He told me that this river gave up a lot of gold back in the 1914 -20 and had many prospectors panning gold, so it might be a good idea to bring some diving gear as those days they working where they could access without diving gear. But later someone did take a Seebee Gorman to one of the rivers there and almost lost his life with a flash flood. So I went hunting in my shed for some of my old gear, 2in venturi 11/2in high pressure pump and hoses. He arrived with his jet boat and we set off to get the ferry. ( I was domiciled in Wellington those days) we left Wellington ar 8.30 arrived in Picton at 12 noon. After driving for 61/2 hrs we reached our destination and setup camp. Those days a Prospecting licence cost 50cents at any NZ postoffice, We went up the river to a gorge and when we came back, on the way we selected what we thought would be a likely spot to try, so got all our gear ashore and put it all together and down I went into twelve feet of absolutely clear water, there was a slate shelf at around eight feet down so I started at the base and removed rocks around five to sixin as I worked the venturi down It was not long before I saw what I thought to be a piece of gold. Not a nugget nor a picker, but a thin flake a third the size of my little finger nail. I went up to show my mate and he let out a hoot yea we were on a good spot. He had boiled the billy so we had lunch and emptied the material out of the riffles in to his brand new gold pan and started panning out the rubbish it was not long before we saw gold nothing big but a lot of flakes and fine. I knew nothing about gold dredging but he knew how to pan as he had done it before. So that was my introduction to gold dredging. I had taken two diving cylinders and they lasted about four hrs and in that time, when we weighed up back home we had just over am ounce of gold. Worth those days $60 an ounce, good money then. Needless to say I was back a year later with a 15in dredge. But that's another story.
