This is a few months old now sorry guys but I'm sure a few people out there are yet to see them.
These are my finds after my first two afternoons on a private property around Orange NSW.
All in all myself and two mates ended up pulling over an ounces out of an area 60m2.
With dozens of bits of sweet candy ranging from .10 to 15 grams.
Speaking of that 15 gram nugget, the story of its unearthing is one of good friendship and hard digging that I'll share bellow.
But it all started two days earlier when I first went to this property. On arrival the owner informed me the area got hit with detectors pretty hard back in the late 80's and early 90's without much luck just bullets and rusty nails mainly. So after an hour or so of chatting the property owner and I come to the agreement that if I find any nuggets bigger than a car hubcap we're going halves but I can pocket anything smaller "hell yes" who could argue with that? What a deal. Anyway you wouldn't dream of it, after no more than 15 minutes in to swinging I walked back to his house and put that sweet 2.4 grammer in his weathered hand (The largest nugget in the first photo). All he could say was "That's why them *******s kept coming back haha" what a champ. That was the very first of many nuggets he would hold in the next few months. So the story of this 15 gramer, god help me
. Well a close friend of mine had been swinging his SDC2300 for a few months and was keen to jag his first +gram bit having found multiple sub gramers. At the time I was about to start my third day on the patch and knowing there was plenty of +gram bits to be found friendship overpowered any hint of gold fever and I invited him to come along. It was the first early morning start I had done on the patch and come 10:00am I had 8 bits in the old film canister and my mate had 1 sub gramer. I could see he was getting rather frustrated as he was working up a gully that had heavy trash and it was deep trash to boot, not long after digging another bit of iron from about 14" he called me over to get my thoughts on a screaming signal he had in a hole about 11" deep "another bit of **** I'd say" he told me. But on inspection it seemed he had hit some kind of cap rock, not hard cap rock like in WA but soft almost like fine conglomerate shale the pick punched in to it pretty easy and we knew the target was under it, so straight away we thought it couldn't be junk could it? So being sure to drive the pointy end of the pick in to the cap away from the target we managed to break it apart and get the target out of the hole. My mate started working through the pile when he got a scream off a nice clump of clay, thinking the target was much smaller than the clump he squeezed it between his fingers but it wasn't any smaller just then his finger pushed the clay aside and gold met sunlight for the first time in a long time maybe ever. My mate was speechless with his hands shaking from shock, there it was his beautiful 15g nugget. Welcome to the +gram club bro.
Sorry about my crappy grammar and I hope you enjoyed the story.
Cheers,
Hoff.
One half of "The Bearded Prospectors".