Beginners Detecting Mistake..."Walking away from gold too soon."

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Excellent post and a great reminder. I know when I've found gold in a virgin spot, I immediately think "patch" and scoot off in every direction trying to find the next piece. When that fails I take a breath, walk back to where the nugget was, and carefully detect the immediate area round the hole, and then start spiralling or gridding out, whatever is more appropriate for the terrain. They are very rarely a loner

And how many times do you come across a patch previously detected by an operator who only chains in the one direction. I've come across this situation on numerous occasions in WA and seen the tell tail signs of where the nuggets they unearthed came from. I've cross chained many of these and come up with a lot of gold that somebody else has found for me. Gold on its side will very often not pick up in one direction but will scream at you if you hit it at 90 deg by cross chaining....nothing better than free gold for no work that somebody else has found for you I say.;)
 
One thing I have noticed with some friends who tag along with us on detecting trips is that they find a piece of gold, quickly go over the area, and then walk on far too soon in an attempt to cover as much ground as they can. When detecting in creek beds gold rarely deposits in singular pieces, so if you find a piece, the chances of more being very close is extremely high. Gold is a very communal metal that likes hanging around with its mates.;) Most know the saying "Go low and go slow" but not enough beginners know that you "don't leave gold to find gold". If you find a couple of pieces in close proximity on say an inside creek bend, or bench, and hear no more obvious targets, don't just walk off thinking you have got it all. A small amount of "surfacing" by taking ten centimetres off the surface can very often expose "nests" of small nuggets just outside the reach of what you have already detected. We do this when chasing Reef gold, but not enough new to the game do this when hunting alluvial as well, instead they ping a small nugget and walk away too soon, hastily chasing the next piece.

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Something as simple as removing the grass from around a detected nugget, can often dramatically increase the total number of your finds. In this instance, we converted 4 small nuggets into 28... Most would have walked away and been happy with just the four.

A very clear case of this was on one of our trips to the Kimberly where we camped on a spot that we had surfaced the year before. We ran out of time so covered our working, placed grass on top of it so absolutely no one could see any sign of detector activity, and decided to revisit the surfaced patch the following year. A continuation of the surfacing soon revealed many more small pieces and even though the gold was only small walking away from it would have left us wondering what could have been. We went from finding a few small detectable targets in close proximity to ending up with what I think was "thirty five" small pieces for only a very small amount of extra work with the pick. Some beginners will walk for kilometres down a creek to get the odd nugget only to find a more experienced operator spending the same amount of time on a hundred metre stretch of the same creek unearthing many more nuggets for a little bit of extra work with a shovel or pick.

When we work a section of creek that has produced a few nuggets we tend to leave the shallow holes unfilled for the duration of our working. This will often show us a clearer map in more detail where the drop out zones during floods occurred. Quite often you might find a larger boulder, tree root, stump, bench, close to a detected nugget, and removing some overburden can often expose some more pieces that would ordinarily have had the operator walk away from. Extra work very often is rewarded with extra success. Same goes for sections of creek that may have false or clay bottoms. Cracks in these bottoms quite often have nuggets fall into them and if the bottom is relatively shallow some "surfacing" should also be considered if a couple of nuggets have already come to light. Remember that there are many nuggets just outside the detectors reach and quite often removing only a few centimetres can make all the difference for success. I have surfaced some creeks, especially in WA, for sometimes a length of ten metres if the gravel is only shallow and been rewarded with numerous nuggets missed by hasty operators chasing only the obvious targets. Coming back later and changing up in coil size before you walk off completely, and looking for those bigger deeper targets is also recommended. Once you find gold stay a while and look outside the obvious square. Ask yourself "have I got it all". Nothing worse than a mate saying after the next flood..."you should see what you left behind buddy". :rolleyes:

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Surfacing a bench as shown in the above photo, will more often than not expose nuggets not normally in the detectors range. Here we converted a few nuggets into almost an ounce. The "Budgie Nugget" below, was found surfacing a sloping rock bar after finding a 3-gram piece. In this instance, we converted a 3-gram piece into an additional 28-gram piece for only a little more effort. Please note, this surfacing was completely restored to original ground level as we intend to re-work this bench next winter.

One thing I cannot stress enough is when you do eventually give up on that spot you have diligently worked, "always fill in your holes" and completely "cover up" your tracks. You may want to come back at a future date with new technology and the last thing you want is the place completely stripped by other operators, especially experienced ones who can distinguish the small tell tail signs of where previous nuggets were unearthed.. Best other operators walk past hearing no targets and thinking "no gold here mate". Break a gold bearing creek into say two hundred metre sections working up and down that section several times on both banks and mid creek before starting on the next section. Don't just blindly walk down the creek for a kilometre or more, even if you think you are working efficiently....chances are you are not. On so many occasions one will find no targets working down a creek only to find they ping one on the return trip, and virtually over the same spot as previously detected. Got to do with coil orientation and many times a different approach will pick out that previously missed target. Covering distance is not the main aim when detecting. Covering every square inch is what is of the utmost importance. This doesn't happen by trying to race your mate down the creek. I'm sure many new to the game come back at the end of the day and say to their mate..."detected hundreds of square metres", down a creek, for not much results, when in fact they covered less than 10% of the available ground efficiently....see it all the time. 😢

Technique can often play a big role in finding those subtle soft targets that many often miss. This may sound controversial to some, but in "My" opinion scraping coils on the ground in this day and age, is often the difference between success and failure when already on proven ground. Skid plates are cheap. The exception to scraping is the obvious such as patch hunting. Once on the gold, having your coil on the ground and listening to those super soft targets is what will give you the advantage over the next operator, as unfortunately the size of the nuggets are getting smaller and harder to distinguish with every season. There's a lot of experienced operators using the same top of the line detectors these days so no shortage of competition for a limited number of nuggets. Some disagree on scraping as certain detectors and coils are susceptible to "coil knocking," and "falsing" often occurs when scraped. I find this is more of a problem when the detector is set too high in its sensitivity settings, running too noisy, or swinging too fast. I prefer to set a detector to run as quietly as possible with a smooth threshold and if this means slightly lowering the sensitivity then so be it. At the end of the day a quiet detector will out perform a noisy one on "nearly" all occasions for general use, and pick up subtle targets a chattery machine often misses. Low and slow is recommended for good reason if you want consistent success. Please note that this thread is targeted at the "beginners" as those with the years under their belts would find much of this as "experience already learned". Good luck out there and may the gold be kind to you....Wal.
Hi, Great tip again Wal. I admit I do go over the immediate area after finding a bit very thoroughly but I haven't scraped more soil of the top. This does sound like WA (could be remote NSW or QLD too) as does the blog after by Moneybox, with creeks that have been dry for thousands of yrs and haven't accumulated a lot of iron, junk etc. The cks I come across in Vic I haven't been running a detector through due to all the junk that accumulates in them and most of them are on private property anyway or in areas close to towns and suburbia. On another note, I found 5 little solid bits all under 0.10gm in a 5 sqm area, with some holes and trenches around and some ironstone exposed. Thought it maybe the stringer reef that Wal mentioned in other posts. So I wondered should I dig down a foot or so in the area and sample some soil to pan? For the experts, is it possible to find an Oz nugget 1m down with a GPX 4500 and14x9 coil. I found it a bit of a stretch when i read it.
 
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Historical common usage (not sure of this agrees with Wal's usage, but I feel these old terms can confuse people - there is nothing magical about them - in the historical literature anyway)

Quartz blow - a bloody big lump or wall of quartz sticking out of the ground
Stringer (reef) - a pissy thin little quartz vein
Reef - something in between the above in size.

Historically they were just used to denote size.

Some others related to attitude eg verticals, floors, or to shape eg saddle reef, or to a real hot-potch mixture of many little veins eg spurs, or to the rock they occurred on eg leatherjackets (the enclosing rock looked like leather), or their attitude relative to the bedding in the enclosing rock eg bedded.

There were some other terms, favoured by one particular 19th C GSV geologist (Herman?), that were mostly in his head and related to his usually incorrect theories. A classical case of thinking from a pre-conceived theory rather than observing and only then creating a theory from the observations. "Droppers" comes to mind. I groan when his are the only historical records available on a goldfield.

I mention these to help those reading 19th Century reports.
 
"Indicator" is another term that confuses many people. It meant nothing more in most cases than something that usually occurred in the vicinity of gold, so therefore indicated that gold might be present. In Victoria prospectors followed thin (often mm width) veinlets of quartz, pyrite or graphite believing that they would magically enrich quartz veins (usually stringers) that cut across them. I find that many detectorologists follow such things today.

I have looked at a lot of these things and I give most of them no credibility, being more part of a strong belief system than statistically related to gold. I am unsure of a very few instances of thin carbon-rich veinlets or iron oxide that might have some chemical control (but very few, themselves uncertain). Carbon and iron can precipitate gold and we see a few good examples of this having occurred, but usually in terms of large masses of ironstone or thick beds of graphitic slate not mm thick features. Most of the thin examples that I have seen in central Victoria are unconvincing. In some cases they only "indicated" in a vague way, For example, the Pencilmark indicator was used at Ballarat East but it formed long before the gold formed and was simply a dark layer of rock the width of a line drawn by a pencil - gold did not even occur on it but prospectors considered correctly that if they went a short distance (many metres) west of it they would find large quartz bodies with gold. So a geometric coincidence (related to folding) and only confined to one side of one fold on one part of one goldfield.

Consider it this way. Say you have a thin pyrite, iron oxide or carbon-rich layer parallel to bedding (perhaps just a distinctive thin bed of black slate within the sedimentary sequence). When the rocks are folded along north-south fold axes, as is common in Victoria, the strike of such distinctive horizons will also end up as north-south. If you detect along it will you be likely to see it crossed by gold-bearing quartz veinlets in places. But not because it necessarily has some special property of localizing gold, simply because tight folds are the main controls on gold-bearing quartz veinlets. That is, if you instead simply walked north along such a fold NOT following such an indicator you might be just as likely to also cross gold-bearing quartz veins (perhaps more of them because you would not be confining yourself to a north-south zone only mm's in width). Why - because the fold controls the distribution of quartz veins and the fold controls the distribution of such "indicator" beds, not because the indicator bed controls the distribution of gold-bearing quartz veinlets. I see people detecting along such things and often wonder what they might be missing some tens of metres on either side.

Just one caveat - where you have a lot of faulting and tight folding , openings will occur parallel to bedding (try folding a bundle of a few pages of paper between your hands and see how openings occur between the pages), If you drag down on a thin bundle of such pages assymetrical, they will tear to form tears across the pages as well - your "faults". If this was folded rock, any gold-bearing fluids will precipitate quartz in these bedding=parallel openings as well as in faults and fractures in the same area. But those bedding-parallel veins are not an indicator of where to look - you are already in the right place (and they do not usually form single isolated "indicators" of the type favoured by prospectors, instead lots of them open up adjacent and parallel to each other, often only cm to tens of centimetres apart).

Geology can sometimes give you more reliable indicators. For example, gold-bearing veinlets commonly occur in parts of a fold that are more tightly folded and faulted, rather than in gently-folded and continuous beds. You can learn to recognize these when you spend time on one goldfield. But of course the more abundant quartz vein fragments in the soil can be an easier indicator.....
 
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And how many times do you come across a patch previously detected by an operator who only chains in the one direction. I've come across this situation on numerous occasions in WA and seen the tell tail signs of where the nuggets they unearthed came from. I've cross chained many of these and come up with a lot of gold that somebody else has found for me. Gold on its side will very often not pick up in one direction but will scream at you if you hit it at 90 deg by cross chaining....nothing better than free gold for no work that somebody else has found for you I say.;)

Wal, We've chained a lot of patches that gave off good gold but I can't say I've ever cross chained. Perhaps I have a few spots that need a revisit :)

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Wal, We've chained a lot of patches that gave off good gold but I can't say I've ever cross chained. Perhaps I have a few spots that need a revisit :)

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Wal, We've chained a lot of patches that gave off good gold but I can't say I've ever cross chained. Perhaps I have a few spots that need a revisit :)

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Looking at that chaining pattern and the amount of nuggets you unearthed I can guarantee 100% that you have left a lot of gold behind for some other prospector.
 
Hi, Great tip again Wal. I admit I do go over the immediate area after finding a bit very thoroughly but I haven't scraped more soil of the top. This does sound like WA (could be remote NSW or QLD too) as does the blog after by Moneybox, with creeks that have been dry for thousands of yrs and haven't accumulated a lot of iron, junk etc. The cks I come across in Vic I haven't been running a detector through due to all the junk that accumulates in them and most of them are on private property anyway or in areas close to towns and suburbia. On another note, I found 5 little solid bits all under 0.10gm in a 5 sqm area, with some holes and trenches around and some ironstone exposed. Thought it maybe the stringer reef that Wal mentioned in other posts. So I wondered should I dig down a foot or so in the area and sample some soil to pan? For the experts, is it possible to find an Oz nugget 1m down with a GPX 4500 and14x9 coil. I found it a bit of a stretch when i read it.


In WA you certainly surface areas where a few nuggets have come from close proximity to each other. I do this in the areas I work in NSW as well with great success. I very much doubt if you can get a 1oz nugget at a metre with the 14 x9 and a 4500. My best with the 5k and a 17 x13 evo and a slug that went 34 grams was a measured 720cm and that was the slightest of murmurs at the surface to start with that most would have walked away from. I've got plenty of nuggets in the 1/2 to 3/4 oz range with the evo 12"round at 50cm but 60cm would be rare that size with such a small coil.
 
In WA you certainly surface areas where a few nuggets have come from close proximity to each other. I do this in the areas I work in NSW as well with great success. I very much doubt if you can get a 1oz nugget at a metre with the 14 x9 and a 4500. My best with the 5k and a 17 x13 evo and a slug that went 34 grams was a measured 720cm and that was the slightest of murmurs at the surface to start with that most would have walked away from. I've got plenty of nuggets in the 1/2 to 3/4 oz range with the evo 12"round at 50cm but 60cm would be rare that size with such a small coil.
I do it fir fun - digging to 1 m is not fun to me ;)
 
"Indicator" is another term that confuses many people. It meant nothing more in most cases than something that usually occurred in the vicinity of gold, so therefore indicated that gold might be present. In Victoria prospectors followed thin (often mm width) veinlets of quartz, pyrite or graphite believing that they would magically enrich quartz veins (usually stringers) that cut across them. I find that many detectorologists follow such things today.

I have looked at a lot of these things and I give most of them no credibility, being more part of a strong belief system than statistically related to gold. I am unsure of a very few instances of thin carbon-rich veinlets or iron oxide that might have some chemical control (but very few, themselves uncertain). Carbon and iron can precipitate gold and we see a few good examples of this having occurred, but usually in terms of large masses of ironstone or thick beds of graphitic slate not mm thick features. Most of the thin examples that I have seen in central Victoria are unconvincing. In some cases they only "indicated" in a vague way, For example, the Pencilmark indicator was used at Ballarat East but it formed long before the gold formed and was simply a dark layer of rock the width of a line drawn by a pencil - gold did not even occur on it but prospectors considered correctly that if they went a short distance (many metres) west of it they would find large quartz bodies with gold. So a geometric coincidence (related to folding) and only confined to one side of one fold on one part of one goldfield.

Consider it this way. Say you have a thin pyrite, iron oxide or carbon-rich layer parallel to bedding (perhaps just a distinctive thin bed of black slate within the sedimentary sequence). When the rocks are folded along north-south fold axes, as is common in Victoria, the strike of such distinctive horizons will also end up as north-south. If you detect along it will you be likely to see it crossed by gold-bearing quartz veinlets in places. But not because it necessarily has some special property of localizing gold, simply because tight folds are the main controls on gold-bearing quartz veinlets. That is, if you instead simply walked north along such a fold NOT following such an indicator you might be just as likely to also cross gold-bearing quartz veins (perhaps more of them because you would not be confining yourself to a north-south zone only mm's in width). Why - because the fold controls the distribution of quartz veins and the fold controls the distribution of such "indicator" beds, not because the indicator bed controls the distribution of gold-bearing quartz veinlets. I see people detecting along such things and often wonder what they might be missing some tens of metres on either side.

Just one caveat - where you have a lot of faulting and tight folding , openings will occur parallel to bedding (try folding a bundle of a few pages of paper between your hands and see how openings occur between the pages), If you drag down on a thin bundle of such pages assymetrical, they will tear to form tears across the pages as well - your "faults". If this was folded rock, any gold-bearing fluids will precipitate quartz in these bedding=parallel openings as well as in faults and fractures in the same area. But those bedding-parallel veins are not an indicator of where to look - you are already in the right place (and they do not usually form single isolated "indicators" of the type favoured by prospectors, instead lots of them open up adjacent and parallel to each other, often only cm to tens of centimetres apart).

Geology can sometimes give you more reliable indicators. For example, gold-bearing veinlets commonly occur in parts of a fold that are more tightly folded and faulted, rather than in gently-folded and continuous beds. You can learn to recognize these when you spend time on one goldfield. But of course the more abundant quartz vein fragments in the soil can be an easier indicator.....

Well explained goldie and agree with all the text....very easily understood by the newbees and great information portrayed.
 
Historical common usage (not sure of this agrees with Wal's usage, but I feel these old terms can confuse people - there is nothing magical about them - in the historical literature anyway)

Quartz blow - a bloody big lump or wall of quartz sticking out of the ground
Stringer (reef) - a pissy thin little quartz vein
Reef - something in between the above in size.

Historically they were just used to denote size.

Some others related to attitude eg verticals, floors, or to shape eg saddle reef, or to a real hot-potch mixture of many little veins eg spurs, or to the rock they occurred on eg leatherjackets (the enclosing rock looked like leather), or their attitude relative to the bedding in the enclosing rock eg bedded.

There were some other terms, favoured by one particular 19th C GSV geologist (Herman?), that were mostly in his head and related to his usually incorrect theories. A classical case of thinking from a pre-conceived theory rather than observing and only then creating a theory from the observations. "Droppers" comes to mind. I groan when his are the only historical records available on a goldfield.

I

"Indicator" is another term that confuses many people. It meant nothing more in most cases than something that usually occurred in the vicinity of gold, so therefore indicated that gold might be present. In Victoria prospectors followed thin (often mm width) veinlets of quartz, pyrite or graphite believing that they would magically enrich quartz veins (usually stringers) that cut across them. I find that many detectorologists follow such things today.

I have looked at a lot of these things and I give most of them no credibility, being more part of a strong belief system than statistically related to gold. I am unsure of a very few instances of thin carbon-rich veinlets or iron oxide that might have some chemical control (but very few, themselves uncertain). Carbon and iron can precipitate gold and we see a few good examples of this having occurred, but usually in terms of large masses of ironstone or thick beds of graphitic slate not mm thick features. Most of the thin examples that I have seen in central Victoria are unconvincing. In some cases they only "indicated" in a vague way, For example, the Pencilmark indicator was used at Ballarat East but it formed long before the gold formed and was simply a dark layer of rock the width of a line drawn by a pencil - gold did not even occur on it but prospectors considered correctly that if they went a short distance (many metres) west of it they would find large quartz bodies with gold. So a geometric coincidence (related to folding) and only confined to one side of one fold on one part of one goldfield.

Consider it this way. Say you have a thin pyrite, iron oxide or carbon-rich layer parallel to bedding (perhaps just a distinctive thin bed of black slate within the sedimentary sequence). When the rocks are folded along north-south fold axes, as is common in Victoria, the strike of such distinctive horizons will also end up as north-south. If you detect along it will you be likely to see it crossed by gold-bearing quartz veinlets in places. But not because it necessarily has some special property of localizing gold, simply because tight folds are the main controls on gold-bearing quartz veinlets. That is, if you instead simply walked north along such a fold NOT following such an indicator you might be just as likely to also cross gold-bearing quartz veins (perhaps more of them because you would not be confining yourself to a north-south zone only mm's in width). Why - because the fold controls the distribution of quartz veins and the fold controls the distribution of such "indicator" beds, not because the indicator bed controls the distribution of gold-bearing quartz veinlets. I see people detecting along such things and often wonder what they might be missing some tens of metres on either side.

Just one caveat - where you have a lot of faulting and tight folding , openings will occur parallel to bedding (try folding a bundle of a few pages of paper between your hands and see how openings occur between the pages), If you drag down on a thin bundle of such pages assymetrical, they will tear to form tears across the pages as well - your "faults". If this was folded rock, any gold-bearing fluids will precipitate quartz in these bedding=parallel openings as well as in faults and fractures in the same area. But those bedding-parallel veins are not an indicator of where to look - you are already in the right place (and they do not usually form single isolated "indicators" of the type favoured by prospectors, instead lots of them open up adjacent and parallel to each other, often only cm to tens of centimetres apart).

Geology can sometimes give you more reliable indicators. For example, gold-bearing veinlets commonly occur in parts of a fold that are more tightly folded and faulted, rather than in gently-folded and continuous beds. You can learn to recognize these when you spend time on one goldfield. But of course the more abundant quartz vein fragments in the soil can be an easier indicator.....
Nice words Goldie. And now, a hundred odd years since the old blokes walked the ground, your idea to walk 10m off the quartz vein is definitely a plan for me from now on.
 
Nice words Goldie. And now, a hundred odd years since the old blokes walked the ground, your idea to walk 10m off the quartz vein is definitely a plan for me from now on.
Folds in central Victoria are a bit wider (eg 200 m apart in Bendigo). More a case of not restricting oneself to some imaginery narrow indicator - look for the other things (e.g. lots of quartz float along a particular fold. lots of old pits etc). And of course topography plays a part - the old-timers might have got most of the gold in soil right over reefs, it is often a bit downhill that the nuggets will have travelled as the rain and gravity move them. The old-timers knew how to follow reefs but without detectors missed nuggets on adjacent hillsides without an easy way to locate them. Likewise the reefs might have got too narrow to mine along strike but might still have shed individual nuggets. Wal has discussed the practical aspects, which are mainly related to common sense and observation once you understand gold distribution.. "Theory" may get you into the right general area, on the right structure but after that it is old-fashioned prospecting aided by modern electronics and a lot of systematic swinging.
 
Hi MB,

May I ask what app/program you are using to track and record your finds?

Thanks,
If you find a rich patch say over an area of around 60 sq metres or more I will always cross chain and never have I done this without finding several more nuggets missed chaining in only the one direction. I don't use any programs to identify my finds but instead lock each nugget onto my hand held GPS and then transfer these locations to a ledger which I keep on all my locations. By doing this I have a very comprehensive map of the area, and the best of these locations I revisit on future trips. Recording what and where you find nuggets and then researching how they may have got to be there very often has led me to find reefs which I would normally have walked away from in my earlier years at the game.
 
Yep do the same Wal along with the date of find. Often quite amazed after loading them onto a map the patterns that sometimes emerge, especially when a Topo map is used 👍 The date more for simply how long since I was there and if after a big rain which may have moved a lot of material ....................... back I go ;)
 
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Yep do the same Wal along with the date of find. Often quite amazed after loading them onto a map the patterns that sometimes emerge, especially when a Topo map is used 👍 The date more for simply how long since I was there and if after a big rain which may have moved a lot of material ....................... back I go ;)

Well worth the effort Diginit and also gives you a chance to do some "extra" research on areas you know have already proven themselves to be productive. Gold doesn't get to a location by chance. It's either deposited from an ancient water course, shed from a nearby reef, or formed in situ from a geological event. Trying to identify which can be a very challenging study.
 
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