Domain Name For Site (caps or not) is www.JOEBODYISRIGHT.com

From: Damn Lucky
To:Dave from Darwin
Date: 01 Feb 2002
Time: 14:20:05

Over the years talked with me mates that we thought at least one of us would have detected a gold reef. Many a time on a patch we thought we might be able to detect the reef its comming from. Got built up several times but never found a source. Has anyone else detected a quartzs reef containing good gold? If so, tell us ya story

From: Dave from Darwin
To: Damn Lucky
Date: 01 Feb 2002
Time: 16:39:35

G'day Mr Lucky

I have found a few on my claims at "The Great Northern" (NT) and so have a few other prospectors. One of them "Jim's Vein" (7 oz/ton) actually had a piece of gold gleaming out of the top of the quartz outcrop. This was in an area that has been flogged by the Chinese in 1880, then the English in 1900, and then twenty years of detectors! Jim waved his 2100 over it and heard nothing, so he called his mate Wally over with his XT18000 and that told the true story. That is why I use the 18000 exclusively for finding veins.

Most veins are not so easy though, because they don't outcrop. I found my "Remembrance Day Vein" (5 oz/ton) on 11/11/2000 after my mate Gary found five specimens nearby with his 2200. He didn't get any signal on the two large specimens that were laying on the surface near the vein though, but the 18000 did! I found the vein about a foot below the surface after a bit of pick and shovel work. The biggest piece I have taken from it so far is 13 gms, although Gary found a solid two ounce nugget in the gravel not far away.

The hardest one to find was the "American Vein" (10 oz/ton). Two Americans and a young Aussie on a tour group picked up about fifty specimens that led straight to the outcrop, or so I thought. It took me three days of hard pick and shovel work to find it! To make matters worse, I had an expert old timer detecting nearby. At least twice a day he would wander over and tell me that I was wasting my time. "They are never there" he would say, "They have all eroded away, I've tried looking for them plenty of times, you are wasting your time." Not what I wanted to hear as I stood there soaked with sweat with an aching back and sore hands! But I found it on the third day, and as a reward, the old timer showed me his nugget collection. It was about two hundred ounces of the most stunning nuggets I have ever seen. "I sell all the crap" he remarked! Then he said, "I think I had better go back and have another look for some of those veins I gave up looking for in Queensland." A good idea I reckon!

The biggest one I have found in recent years is my "Bank of England" vein. I found it late in the day of the first Bank of England gold sale a few years ago, before I bought my 18000. I was wandering around the diggings with a beer in my hand and noticed some green arsenic staining on what I thought was a small floater. It turned out to be the outcrop. It took me a month to expose it all with pick and shovel. It is ten metres long by two metres wide and going about half an ounce to the ton. The Chinese had worked their way up the gully, straight over the top of it and then down the gully on the other side.

I knew there was a bit of fine gold in it, but I assumed that there was no nuggets in it, because all the visitors that came with their expensive Minelabs couldn't find anything. Then I got an elderly visitor from the Gold Coast with a brand new 18000. He started detecting along the vein and to our great surprise, there were little nuggets everywhere. We both had a lovely time with it and it paid for my 18000.

I could go on and on with similar stories, but that should be enough to fire you up? There is one big problem if you are in WA though. Their geology is a lot older and often the bedrock is weathered to clay, or what the Geos call saprolite. Finding veins in that kind of country is going to be a lot harder, unless you have a big excavator at your disposal. Or a lot of time and a strong back! Best to stick to areas where you know that solid bedrock isn't far down, say a metre or less. And don't only rely on the most expensive Minelab detectors. They are beautiful machines for finding deep nuggets but the wrong machine for finding veins. Most of the gold in veins is very small, so use a high frequency machine like the 18000 on 60 KHz, otherwise you might walk away from it. Don't rely on assays either! They are useless for coarse or nuggety gold veins. Panning large (10 kg) milled samples is far more accurate. Panning screened (-6mm) soil samples can often put you closer to the vein.

So Mr Lucky, grab your pick and shovel and an 18000 and go and find that vein. It will be there somewhere! Good luck with it,

Dave