Hows it going folks, I've been on three trips out prospecting lately. I have teamed up with a local guy who is also a member on this forum. We decided to try out a different place to the usual Wakamarina that everyone here in Blenheim frequents. I took my detector along and my mate took his 2inch keene backpack dredge. once we got to our chosen creek we dredged for about an hour and had absolutely nothing in the box. Disheartened we set off for a look up the creek with the detector. Well after about 15 min I got a faint signal that I very nearly dismissed as ground noise. After a bit of gentle persuasion of the bedrock the signal became clear and loud and shortly after out popped a very rough 2 grammer. It had been lodged in a fairly deep crevice which we proceeded to further break open and detect/pan and after about an hour we had 12 grams from this one crevice! Most of the gold was coarse nuggets. Further prospecting up the river we found another area of bedrock that held some gold and we got another 3 grams from this patch. In total 15grams for the day!!
The second trip we organised was for the following weekend and the destination was the second patch we found on day one. This time we took the 2 inch dredge up there and again dredged for about an hour without any gold in the box. We shifted location by about 15m and saw gold on the bedrock almost straight away. We dredged for a couple of hours with gold in most of the crevices we uncovered although none of it was very big. At about lunchtime I had a detect 20m fro the dredge and got about 2 grams from a bank that was eroding, then it was back to dredging. We finished up dredging at about 3 and were fairly cold by then. The clean up was quite good and we had around 1/4 of an ounce in the dredge. Not quite satisfied just yet we dug into the previously mentioned eroding bank and found a .3g then a 1g and finally a 4.9g nugget!!! Time to go home on that positive note.
So having found all this gold quite easily we thought we really need to get the 6 inch dredge in there. We did this over queens birthday and spent 3 days working our arses off. It took us till he third day to get the dredge up to the Patch from the second day, a total of 7 hours dragging gear!!! We tested spots on the way up but found little. On the third day we dredged the patch from the second trip and had a hard time finding anything, we must have cleaned out all the gold. At about 2pm that day we started to drag the gear back down the stream but only made but half way to the truck. Yesterday we went back and dragged it the rest of the way out. I also managed to bag myself a 4 pound trout that fell victim to a grapefruit sized rock. Haha. Oh and we only ended up getting 2.9grams for the three days. What a let down.
Anyway I had some spare time today and thought I'd fill you guys in on what I have been doing.
Pics below are of gold from trip one and 2, no pics from queens birthday trip.
1864hatter attached the following image(s):