Gold detecting - part IV

Continuing the story from my previous gold detecting posts:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

It’s been a while since my last post on this topic.

I've been out detecting quite regularly, and accumulating more equipment.. I just realized I already have 7 different coils for the gold machine I have here(!)

I’ll start off with an update on the local wildlife, where my sightings now include e.g.







A Golden Orb Weaver spider, which happened to catch a prey just as I was about to take pictures. The small spider is a male. Encounters with these always freak me out a bit, as I tend to notice them seconds before I’m about to stick my nose into their webs.


Here’s another one floating in mid-air.. Can you find it?.. They’re rather large, and venomous of course.





A bobtail lizard. One of the few Australian animals that don’t stick deadly venomous fangs into you at lightning speed when you run into them. I like these.
This one is about a foot in length, maybe a bit more.


Now on to the good stuff:



In many areas I’ve had some success with “dumpster diving”, i.e. digging up a bunch of surface junk first, to get to the good signals down below.

Here’s an example: the little nugget was exactly under the piece of junk (a few inches down, smack right in the middle of the hole). I found several nuggets using this method, but it’s exhausting to dig all day if the weather is hot (and being used to Arctic temperatures doesn’t help!).

I haven't gotten around to getting one of those rare earth magnets to stick on the end of my pick handle. This would be a great help during these dumpster diving sessions!



Here’s a piece I managed to fish out from a very heavily detected area. It was in a tricky spot wedged against a tree. This one broke the 1-gram mark (most of my finds have been matchhead-sized 0.2-grammers..)



The general area where it was found:



This is my total so far. A few of these still need to visit the ultrasonic cleaner.



And again:



And again. 29 pieces, 9 grams in all.



I expect to spend at least some more time in Australia in the coming months. Still looking for that elusive multi-gram piece…. !

-Z