Getting started in gold prospecting

Hi folks, my names Bob,
I’ve recently became interested in this world.
What is the best way to gain knowledge to one day have my own claim in the future.
Is it reading a bunch and finding a mentor/job or a course.
At the moment I’m green as and my knowledge is limited to basic machinery skills and watching videos on YouTube or tv. Haha ( so zero)
Any small tips or advice is appreciated
Cheers Bob

Read, read, read here Bob, you will gain very helpful information here, for someone like you starting out.

Bob. There are four main ways that gold is recovered. Wet washing, Dry washing, detecting and hard rock.
To start out detecting, dry washing or hard rock mining. Requires any or all of detailed knowledge, experience or a leap faith into fairly expensive gear.
You can start out wet washing with a pan. Not only cheap but a great learning experience that will allow stepping up into river sluicing and high banking.
By all means read and listen to others but the best learning is done from experience. So get out there as soon as you can and it will start happening.
As the old saying goes Nobody ever found their first gold in their living room (unless they bought the house where my kids spilt my alluvial gold on the shag pile carpet).
Good luck and hope to hear more about your journey.

I found another method for collecting gold specifically with magnetite, it won't work if the gold doesn't have magnetite as gold isn't magnetic. I often go magnet fishing in open mine holes and occasionally pull up gold that the old timer probably dropped while getting in and out of his hole. Easy way to get some nice nuggets with very little effort.

Panning is a great place to start to learn how to look for gold. ....Hmm I see some quartz in this stream bed so worth a try, the stream flows over that rock bar, over there are some cracks i can clean out, here is some magnetite in my pan dregs so i am on the right track, lets clean that crack out down to the bottom, hey whats that yellow speck? woo hoo !

Also If you can spring for a cheap detector, even a Vanquish, and use it for park and beach detecting then you will soon find out if grubbing around in the bush digging big or small holes is really your thing.

Beach and park detecting is a total cruise compared with nugget hunting and working a claim is a huge step up again.

If you cant handle wandering around digging holes in beach/ park then dont waste 10x that money on a gold detector.

buy a pan ,i use the garret pans but others swear by other brands all to their own ,most of them work
you can buy a pan kit or a single pan ,but you will need a sieve/classifier, pan kits come with one

learn how to read the creeks/rivers either dry or wet
when dry they offer a lot more info on where to have a scratch

i will probably get shot with this last bit of info, long story short

a mate and i were at a gold expo in gippsland vic (2018),we were sitting around the fire having a few yarns
my mate asked a elderly person there that had owned and used just about every metal/gold detector ever made

what is the best metal detector to buy his missus for some gold detecting
he said buy her a gold pan she will find more gold with a pan than she will ever find with a detector

so she has the sdc2300 and he has the pans