Mrs M and I left in April this year for a birthday party at Shark Bay. We spent the first month fishing and sight seeing with many of our family members from the eastern states. From there we headed northeast to escape the oncoming winter thats quite cold and wet in WAs southwest.
Before leaving home we packed all the tools for prospecting. We have a crow bar, shovels, sieves, rakes, picks, detectors, hoes, rope ladder, ropes and chains, maps and GPS and a PLB just in case something serious happens. Weve shared our months away looking for old bottles, gemstones, rusty relics and gold. Wed planned on three or four months away but I was always hopeful it would still drag out a bit further. The nasty weather down south helped me there
This is the result of some serious research and several weeks or really intense detecting in the Pilbara region of WA. We took a break on a couple of occasions collecting colourful rocks, bottles, coins and things and then hit the gold again.
There were some huge gold finds while we were there. Several groups of people were involved prospecting on a pending lease just a few kilometres down the road from Karratha. Over 1000 ounces were reportedly found but as the news spread of each new find the place was crawling with vehicles and detectors. We're not that keen on being seen in the field so for the majority of the time we headed off to more remote locations hoping to pick up the odd bit. We travelled into remote hills and valleys where at times there were no roads or tracks. Fortunately our vehicle only suffered one puncture in the bush and a tyre blow-out on the highway.
The detectors needed some attention while we were in the bush. We purchased and wore out 5 skid plates on the SDC and ended up repairing the last of them to keep going. I started out with a new skid plate and wore out 2 more on the 4500 before repairing the last one of those as well. The coil hinges wore out on the SDC causing the coil to flop about with no way of tightening it. I used the plastic from a yoghurt container to form a replaceable bush in the hinge, something it should have been made with. The battery charger on the SDC was always troublesome but it got to the point where we had to replace it and while we were at it we bought a third set of rechargeable 'C' size batteries. The adaptor cable on the SDC gave trouble again so Mrs M ended up using the original Koss earphones but it looks like the audio plug on the detector is a bit dicky because it still gave her trouble. I had trouble keeping the skid plates on the 4500 until I got Leukoplast from the chemist. It's much more abrasive resistant than the insulation tape I used previously. The batteries on the White's GMT (our pin pointer) went flat as well and they were only about 18 months old
We got lucky, very lucky, because we are used to finding quite a bit of small gold but rarely get a decent sized nugget. This time we got several and many of them came from well worked ground that has seen way too many GPZ7000s over it in the last couple of years. Hunting the yellow we used the GPX4500 with a 14" Coiltek Mono Elite and an SDC2300 along with a little blood, sweat and tears :/