nero_design
New member
I have just returned from my second trip to the Gold Fields of New South Wales, Australia - about 4 hours away - after waiting three weeks for the rain to stop. We're supposed to be in a drought yet the rain has continued unabated, giving me plenty of time to research my destination and the history of the region. I read everything I could get my hands on to help orient myself with what I might find and what sort of environment I was likely to encounter.
I headed back out across the thick fog in the Blue Mountains to get to Sofala and Wattle Flat where I could continue searching for artifacts, gold and wildlife whilst researching more of the town's rich history.
On the way across the flats from Bathurst to the town of Peel, I came across a layer of what appeared to be Quartz pebbles. Since this area was once the location of heavy quartz reef mining, it might be a result of this mining... or perhaps it was a natural deposit. Eitherway, the road sliced right through it so I stopped to take some pictures. Perhaps those in the know might venture a guess for me... I've included links to the two photographs directly below:
http://www.pbase.com/nero_design/image/90426555/original.jpg
http://www.pbase.com/nero_design/image/90426556/original.jpg
http://www.pbase.com/nero_design/image/90426567/original.jpg
Back to our cabin where we stayed during our first visit last month
http://www.pbase.com/nero_design/image/90426573/original.jpg
The flat bushland near Sofala where we commenced our fossicking
We unpacked when we got to our spot in Wattle Flat and went for a bushwalk to see what might be found on the site of the old diggings. Almost immediately, I found an untouched (albeit thin) reef of white quartz in the bank of a creek. You can spot it easily in this picture as it lies alongslide the left side of my pick-axe handle in this picture:
http://www.pbase.com/nero_design/image/90426558/original.jpg
Can you spot the quartz vein beside the pick-axe?
Now I ran the Terra X-70 all around the wall of the creek and quickly locked onto a very strong signal in Prospecting mode. The signal was also visible in All Metal Mode but NOT in Relic mode... save perhaps for a single "blip". I was excited because this was where some of the largest nuggets in the world had been found. And I was digging through soil that had not been disturbed before. After half an hour of painful digging, I had dug beyond the Red clay and reached pockets of Grey Clay with yellow-tinged clay inside it. I was convinced that there must be a likelihood of gold in this material and grabbed my mini-panning dish to sample some of the clay and rushed down the creek to a body of water to pan the soil. After 20 minutes of crushing and washing the clay, I found the particles on the bottom were nothing of interest and returned to my excavation.
On the way back, I made the mistake of brushing past a wasp nest which was perched on a nearby twig on a small dead tree growing out of a creek bank. The first I realized of my mistake was my first wasp sting on the underside of my right arm. It felt like white hot metal with electricity had been jabbed into my arm. Profoundly painful. Strangely, they ignored me after this so i snapped some shots before the pain subsided.
http://www.pbase.com/nero_design/image/90426568/original.jpg
Here's the nest I bumped... hard to see a difference between it and the gumleaves due to the unusual shape.
http://www.pbase.com/nero_design/image/90426569/original.jpg
Here's a closer view with a 200mm zoom lens...and a pic of my arm a few moments afterwards... three days later and the lump was still there:
http://www.pbase.com/nero_design/image/90426570/original.jpg
Ouch!
The hole we dug in the wall of the creek bed to find the 'mystery target'. Just how deep is the X-Terra 70 supposed to penetrate in moist clay?
Now I continued to dig at that spot for hours without extracting the target and the signal was still strong. We returned to the cabin as the sun set and I spent the night looking at maps of the area to see what the signal could be. That night, I killed 4 different types of wasp in our cabin as payback for my earlier sting. My wife Rena opened the bedroom door to use the bathroom and found an 8 inch spider sitting on the other side of the door. I was forced to get out of bed to remove the offending critter and took the lazy way out by spraying it with bug spray and then sitting the can on top of the spider when it made a run under the door and into the bedroom.
Blue Gum Cabin - Interior
The next morning I got up when the sun was over the horizon and scouted around without finding anything.
Here's my basic tools & materials for a quick 1 hour morning fossick...
I fossicked around with my metal detector and found iron scrap and broken horseshoes along with old fencing wire and some objects buried too deep to extract, even after several days of digging. Strange and enormous mushrooms grew out of the earth at odd angles and butterflies and birds were everywhere since it is now summer. The flies were terrible again... and I had to get used to the taste of repellant in my mouth, nose and even my eyes. The problem I found was that to dig a target, you had to bend down, and then the sweat would run into my eyes or drip off my nose and into my mouth, all the while coated with bugspray.
When the sun went down, my wife Rena and I retreated to our cabin after dinner at the local cafe. We walked over to the property owner's house and took some pictures of his telescope. - Mars was up but so close to the horizon that it was not much more than a blob of orange but on a previous trip we'd seen nebula and looked at the craters of the moon in detail.
The property owner, Stargazing with hisTelescope
The next day, we returned to our diggings to see if we could extract and identify our mystery target near the quartz ...yet after several more hours, I had to lance the blisters on my fingers so I could bandage them in preparation for further digging elsewhere. I grew to loath my pick-axe. Rena busied herself photographing the wildlife as I dug and occasionally she stopped to help me. The clay was too dense for the shovel so we used the pick-axe and deepened our hole to a depth of 14 inches. Still nothing. Signal was still strong. There were the remains of an old creek bed sandwiched between the clay layers which had fine stones of quartz and river pebbles in the pockets occasionally. I found a dense layer of compressed gumleaves which made me think the creekbed I was digging into was VERY old. In the end, I had to stop so as to see more of the region. After a total of 4 hours of digging this elusive target, we packed up and left. (EDIT- update * See below - Target was a metal pipe embedded beneath the creek bed)
Hills Beyond the Turon River
The weeks of rain made the hills a lush saturated green and fine weather on the day made it a treat to use the Circular Polarizer for daylight shots. We drove onto a 4 wheel drive track in our two wheel drive car and continued across dozens of kilometers of farms, abandoned diggings and belligerent cows which constantly stood on the road ahead of us and blocked our progress. Wall-to-wall private leases meant we couldn't leave the road or the car and eventually, inspired by lack of breakfast, we returned to the township of nearby Sofala to get lunch.
A grasshopper does a good job pretending to be a leaf.
Old Digs from the 1850s visible in the foreground
Rena wanders into the Vine Garden cafe as the camera pans down the main street of Sofala at midday.
Rena at the Sofala Cafe
When we sat to eat, one of the locals was kind enough to answer some of our questions about the region and even showed us a gold nugget their child had found. Apparently it had been relegated a position between the child's toy Matchbox cars and we were allowed to photograph it in the owner's hand. Looks like it was smoothed from river wear and the iron stone was still filling in a number of the larger holes. Wonder if the child will get it back? LOL! It sure felt heavy! Lovely color too.
A local child found this and was playing with it before her mother noticed.
My wife snapped this shot of me with the X-Terra without me knowing... You can't tell in the pic but I was using the tree stump to keep my balance in the steep slope. Those rocks above me are the remains of a road built in 1871. It was built by short-term convicts, most of whom had been arrested for Prospecting License evasion . It allowed the Bullock teams to cart ore from the mountain to the town of Sofala for washing. Each bag of ore cost 10 shillings to carry and gave up between 1.7 to 4 pounds of alluvial gold. That's a lot of gold! Shame I couldn't find any!
Native Gold Nugget
We found a large tree that had fallen on the side of a mountain named after the Gold Nuggets freely given up a century ago and I opted to leave the Pro 1 behind in order to scale the mountainside to get to the tree. I slipped on the near vertical rockface and grabbed a cactus in my fist when I almost lost my footing. The pain was literally indescribably and the inch-long spines were barbed so getting to the ancient tree was a horror of it's own. Inside the tangle of roots were great lumps of red glay which we were pleased to discover had a mass of native gold nuggets scattered about inside the matrix. We extracted them one at a time using our metal detector and then returned to the cabin to dress my cuts, blisters, stings and scrapes. I was still pulling cactus spines from my forearm and thumb. You can see one of my blisters on the finger with two bandaids on it.
Gold Nuggets from the Tree Stump.... If you look at the finger with two Bandaids on it, you'll see one of my blisters. Ouch! I had to lance my blisters again with sterile scalpels before wrapping them properly in preparation for the following day's digging. It turned out to be a good idea.
Lucky I brought a spare pair of shoes... I had to dine out with a friend at a Bathurst restaurant that night.
The following day I used Google Earth Maps, which I had downloaded to my iPod-Touch, to locate my final target area - which was an abandoned Gold Digging near the town of Portland about half a day's drive East of where we were. The space-maps showed which areas were populated, the main roads and the denser bushland. This was close to the Coal Seam so I was not sure if I would find gold. We drove to visit two areas on the way which were in the State Forest and much of it was closed for controlled burning and processing. I stopped twice for an hour at each spot but only found angry ants and scrap iron. We then proceeded to the town of Portland.
Approaching the town of Portland in the car.. you can see the power station cooling towers here which are probably fed by the nearby coal field.
The creek I wanted was located on crown land which fed the gold fields so I thought I'd try my hand. My new maps were apparently several years out of date and so friendly locals were kind enough to direct us on where to go. I drove through several mountain ridges that were meant for 4 wheel drive vehicles and was forced to abandon the car at an impasse before making the journey to the creek bed. It was all down hill for several hours and that was a bit worrisome because it meant I'd be climbing back up later. There were thick clouds of flies around our faces and Rena was more than fed up with them.
The flies were plentiful and troublesome - here's a few on my backpack... about to trade places with the thick mob assaulting our faces.
Kangaroos and unpleasantly large (1.5 inch long) ants watched as we ran out of steam just as we got to the river below the mountain I had parked on. I'd found some rifle shells from local lads who'd obviously fired a few rounds off in the past. I also found fossilized coral on the ground from eons ago when a vast inland ocean existed here. Eventually, I found a large cluster of diggings which were probably made in the 1850s-1870s. The first mine shaft I found was vertical and had logs across the top. But the second shaft was dug horizontally into the earth from the direction of the river and my detector squealed with a strong signal indicating gold or iron (the two often mingle in this region so you can't just screen out the iron).
I dug for nearly an hour but the skin on my hands was still on fire from the previous day's abuse and I started to give up and packed my fold-out shovel before giving it one last try (I mean, I probably would never return here so why not find out what it was?). At last I struck something hard and metallic with my pick-axe... I pulled it free from the red clay and saw what it was. Another two foot pick-axe blade! The old style with the hole in the side rather than through the middle. Probably from 1870's when the diggings were active there. I was filling in the large hole I'd dug when a small 1 inch scorpion wandered across the soil past my fingers and I spent 10 minutes trying to coax it into a small jar to allow me to photograph it later when I got to the Camera.
Tiny 1inch Scorpion
I laughed and almost sobbed for the effort had drained me and I had left the water in the car. Might be parasites in the river so I couldn't drink that. I made it across the 6 foot wall of brambles to the river and found it littered with bones and skulls of other creatures who had stumbled past the wall of brambles to get to the water but could not return. The sun was dropping and thunder sounded in the distance. I suddenly felt very alone. I was about to leave when I hit another signal near the mine shaft entrances and I stopped long enough to dig the target and see what it was. I'd left the Pro 1 with Rena halfway up the mountain but just under the soil, about 9 inches beneath the surface was a bright yellow Gold Sovereign. It was so old it had the Young Queen Victoria head on one side... and St George slaying a Dragon on the other. It was in remarkable condition and was dated 1884 - although i reminded myself that these coins were so pure in gold content that they simply didn't rust. There was a little iron oxidization which I cleaned off with the ultrasonic cleaner when I got home and a quick dip in acid, along with the gold nuggets.
Cleaning Nuggets
The nuggets were cleaned with Hydrochloric acid to remove any ironstone and quartz trapped inside the golden, chewing gum-looking shapes. I then photographed them for future reference and to put the pictures on my iPod. I found some large black stones which were very light at the mine. They look and feel like pumice and yet they triggered the X-Terra 70 every single time as a target. I dug two of them before giving up. Does anyone know what they could be? Tin ore maybee? Any tests I can conduct?
Sovereign with Nuggets collected
This is the obverse side of the Gold Sovereign after careful cleaning and a VERY gentle polish with a jeweler's cloth. I am already planning to return to the creek bed to recommence my last digging as there were two targets I was not able to find in time before leaving. I hope to use the pictures I took of the country side with my Pro 1 for creating references for oil paintings which I wish to do.
A 'Farthing' (Penny) - also sporting Queen Victoria
Some of the targets that were dug - during cleaning.
Cleaning junk iron targets via Electrolysis
Cleaning the Gold Sovereign with an Ultrasonic Cleaner
Sovereign - Obverse side showing St George slaying a Dragon
Of the nuggets Rena and I found, the heaviest was just 4.8 grams and the lightest was 0.20 of a gram The smallest one was with the cluster of small nuggets in the clack packed roots of the fallen tree we explored. Not much I guess when you consider the amount of work involved. I can't help but wonder if I should consider another detector or if I was just looking in areas that have already been well worked by others.
Will head out again when I get around to another spell of good weather and another opportunity to return to my previous locations.
If no-one discovers my creek-bed dig, I may return to try to extract the mystery target near the quartz reef. Anyone think I was wasting my time there? Could it be a false signal perhaps?
Does a concave hole give or enhance a bad signal?
There's a few pictures here from this trip if anyone wants to see more of the region and the critters:
http://www.pbase.com/nero_design/pro1_sofala2
--
Regards,
Marco Nero.
I headed back out across the thick fog in the Blue Mountains to get to Sofala and Wattle Flat where I could continue searching for artifacts, gold and wildlife whilst researching more of the town's rich history.
On the way across the flats from Bathurst to the town of Peel, I came across a layer of what appeared to be Quartz pebbles. Since this area was once the location of heavy quartz reef mining, it might be a result of this mining... or perhaps it was a natural deposit. Eitherway, the road sliced right through it so I stopped to take some pictures. Perhaps those in the know might venture a guess for me... I've included links to the two photographs directly below:
http://www.pbase.com/nero_design/image/90426555/original.jpg
http://www.pbase.com/nero_design/image/90426556/original.jpg
http://www.pbase.com/nero_design/image/90426567/original.jpg
Back to our cabin where we stayed during our first visit last month
http://www.pbase.com/nero_design/image/90426573/original.jpg
The flat bushland near Sofala where we commenced our fossicking
We unpacked when we got to our spot in Wattle Flat and went for a bushwalk to see what might be found on the site of the old diggings. Almost immediately, I found an untouched (albeit thin) reef of white quartz in the bank of a creek. You can spot it easily in this picture as it lies alongslide the left side of my pick-axe handle in this picture:
http://www.pbase.com/nero_design/image/90426558/original.jpg
Can you spot the quartz vein beside the pick-axe?
Now I ran the Terra X-70 all around the wall of the creek and quickly locked onto a very strong signal in Prospecting mode. The signal was also visible in All Metal Mode but NOT in Relic mode... save perhaps for a single "blip". I was excited because this was where some of the largest nuggets in the world had been found. And I was digging through soil that had not been disturbed before. After half an hour of painful digging, I had dug beyond the Red clay and reached pockets of Grey Clay with yellow-tinged clay inside it. I was convinced that there must be a likelihood of gold in this material and grabbed my mini-panning dish to sample some of the clay and rushed down the creek to a body of water to pan the soil. After 20 minutes of crushing and washing the clay, I found the particles on the bottom were nothing of interest and returned to my excavation.
On the way back, I made the mistake of brushing past a wasp nest which was perched on a nearby twig on a small dead tree growing out of a creek bank. The first I realized of my mistake was my first wasp sting on the underside of my right arm. It felt like white hot metal with electricity had been jabbed into my arm. Profoundly painful. Strangely, they ignored me after this so i snapped some shots before the pain subsided.
http://www.pbase.com/nero_design/image/90426568/original.jpg
Here's the nest I bumped... hard to see a difference between it and the gumleaves due to the unusual shape.
http://www.pbase.com/nero_design/image/90426569/original.jpg
Here's a closer view with a 200mm zoom lens...and a pic of my arm a few moments afterwards... three days later and the lump was still there:
http://www.pbase.com/nero_design/image/90426570/original.jpg
Ouch!
The hole we dug in the wall of the creek bed to find the 'mystery target'. Just how deep is the X-Terra 70 supposed to penetrate in moist clay?
Now I continued to dig at that spot for hours without extracting the target and the signal was still strong. We returned to the cabin as the sun set and I spent the night looking at maps of the area to see what the signal could be. That night, I killed 4 different types of wasp in our cabin as payback for my earlier sting. My wife Rena opened the bedroom door to use the bathroom and found an 8 inch spider sitting on the other side of the door. I was forced to get out of bed to remove the offending critter and took the lazy way out by spraying it with bug spray and then sitting the can on top of the spider when it made a run under the door and into the bedroom.
Blue Gum Cabin - Interior
The next morning I got up when the sun was over the horizon and scouted around without finding anything.
Here's my basic tools & materials for a quick 1 hour morning fossick...
I fossicked around with my metal detector and found iron scrap and broken horseshoes along with old fencing wire and some objects buried too deep to extract, even after several days of digging. Strange and enormous mushrooms grew out of the earth at odd angles and butterflies and birds were everywhere since it is now summer. The flies were terrible again... and I had to get used to the taste of repellant in my mouth, nose and even my eyes. The problem I found was that to dig a target, you had to bend down, and then the sweat would run into my eyes or drip off my nose and into my mouth, all the while coated with bugspray.
When the sun went down, my wife Rena and I retreated to our cabin after dinner at the local cafe. We walked over to the property owner's house and took some pictures of his telescope. - Mars was up but so close to the horizon that it was not much more than a blob of orange but on a previous trip we'd seen nebula and looked at the craters of the moon in detail.
The property owner, Stargazing with hisTelescope
The next day, we returned to our diggings to see if we could extract and identify our mystery target near the quartz ...yet after several more hours, I had to lance the blisters on my fingers so I could bandage them in preparation for further digging elsewhere. I grew to loath my pick-axe. Rena busied herself photographing the wildlife as I dug and occasionally she stopped to help me. The clay was too dense for the shovel so we used the pick-axe and deepened our hole to a depth of 14 inches. Still nothing. Signal was still strong. There were the remains of an old creek bed sandwiched between the clay layers which had fine stones of quartz and river pebbles in the pockets occasionally. I found a dense layer of compressed gumleaves which made me think the creekbed I was digging into was VERY old. In the end, I had to stop so as to see more of the region. After a total of 4 hours of digging this elusive target, we packed up and left. (EDIT- update * See below - Target was a metal pipe embedded beneath the creek bed)
Hills Beyond the Turon River
The weeks of rain made the hills a lush saturated green and fine weather on the day made it a treat to use the Circular Polarizer for daylight shots. We drove onto a 4 wheel drive track in our two wheel drive car and continued across dozens of kilometers of farms, abandoned diggings and belligerent cows which constantly stood on the road ahead of us and blocked our progress. Wall-to-wall private leases meant we couldn't leave the road or the car and eventually, inspired by lack of breakfast, we returned to the township of nearby Sofala to get lunch.
A grasshopper does a good job pretending to be a leaf.
Old Digs from the 1850s visible in the foreground
Rena wanders into the Vine Garden cafe as the camera pans down the main street of Sofala at midday.
Rena at the Sofala Cafe
When we sat to eat, one of the locals was kind enough to answer some of our questions about the region and even showed us a gold nugget their child had found. Apparently it had been relegated a position between the child's toy Matchbox cars and we were allowed to photograph it in the owner's hand. Looks like it was smoothed from river wear and the iron stone was still filling in a number of the larger holes. Wonder if the child will get it back? LOL! It sure felt heavy! Lovely color too.
A local child found this and was playing with it before her mother noticed.
My wife snapped this shot of me with the X-Terra without me knowing... You can't tell in the pic but I was using the tree stump to keep my balance in the steep slope. Those rocks above me are the remains of a road built in 1871. It was built by short-term convicts, most of whom had been arrested for Prospecting License evasion . It allowed the Bullock teams to cart ore from the mountain to the town of Sofala for washing. Each bag of ore cost 10 shillings to carry and gave up between 1.7 to 4 pounds of alluvial gold. That's a lot of gold! Shame I couldn't find any!
Native Gold Nugget
We found a large tree that had fallen on the side of a mountain named after the Gold Nuggets freely given up a century ago and I opted to leave the Pro 1 behind in order to scale the mountainside to get to the tree. I slipped on the near vertical rockface and grabbed a cactus in my fist when I almost lost my footing. The pain was literally indescribably and the inch-long spines were barbed so getting to the ancient tree was a horror of it's own. Inside the tangle of roots were great lumps of red glay which we were pleased to discover had a mass of native gold nuggets scattered about inside the matrix. We extracted them one at a time using our metal detector and then returned to the cabin to dress my cuts, blisters, stings and scrapes. I was still pulling cactus spines from my forearm and thumb. You can see one of my blisters on the finger with two bandaids on it.
Gold Nuggets from the Tree Stump.... If you look at the finger with two Bandaids on it, you'll see one of my blisters. Ouch! I had to lance my blisters again with sterile scalpels before wrapping them properly in preparation for the following day's digging. It turned out to be a good idea.
Lucky I brought a spare pair of shoes... I had to dine out with a friend at a Bathurst restaurant that night.
The following day I used Google Earth Maps, which I had downloaded to my iPod-Touch, to locate my final target area - which was an abandoned Gold Digging near the town of Portland about half a day's drive East of where we were. The space-maps showed which areas were populated, the main roads and the denser bushland. This was close to the Coal Seam so I was not sure if I would find gold. We drove to visit two areas on the way which were in the State Forest and much of it was closed for controlled burning and processing. I stopped twice for an hour at each spot but only found angry ants and scrap iron. We then proceeded to the town of Portland.
Approaching the town of Portland in the car.. you can see the power station cooling towers here which are probably fed by the nearby coal field.
The creek I wanted was located on crown land which fed the gold fields so I thought I'd try my hand. My new maps were apparently several years out of date and so friendly locals were kind enough to direct us on where to go. I drove through several mountain ridges that were meant for 4 wheel drive vehicles and was forced to abandon the car at an impasse before making the journey to the creek bed. It was all down hill for several hours and that was a bit worrisome because it meant I'd be climbing back up later. There were thick clouds of flies around our faces and Rena was more than fed up with them.
The flies were plentiful and troublesome - here's a few on my backpack... about to trade places with the thick mob assaulting our faces.
Kangaroos and unpleasantly large (1.5 inch long) ants watched as we ran out of steam just as we got to the river below the mountain I had parked on. I'd found some rifle shells from local lads who'd obviously fired a few rounds off in the past. I also found fossilized coral on the ground from eons ago when a vast inland ocean existed here. Eventually, I found a large cluster of diggings which were probably made in the 1850s-1870s. The first mine shaft I found was vertical and had logs across the top. But the second shaft was dug horizontally into the earth from the direction of the river and my detector squealed with a strong signal indicating gold or iron (the two often mingle in this region so you can't just screen out the iron).
I dug for nearly an hour but the skin on my hands was still on fire from the previous day's abuse and I started to give up and packed my fold-out shovel before giving it one last try (I mean, I probably would never return here so why not find out what it was?). At last I struck something hard and metallic with my pick-axe... I pulled it free from the red clay and saw what it was. Another two foot pick-axe blade! The old style with the hole in the side rather than through the middle. Probably from 1870's when the diggings were active there. I was filling in the large hole I'd dug when a small 1 inch scorpion wandered across the soil past my fingers and I spent 10 minutes trying to coax it into a small jar to allow me to photograph it later when I got to the Camera.
Tiny 1inch Scorpion
I laughed and almost sobbed for the effort had drained me and I had left the water in the car. Might be parasites in the river so I couldn't drink that. I made it across the 6 foot wall of brambles to the river and found it littered with bones and skulls of other creatures who had stumbled past the wall of brambles to get to the water but could not return. The sun was dropping and thunder sounded in the distance. I suddenly felt very alone. I was about to leave when I hit another signal near the mine shaft entrances and I stopped long enough to dig the target and see what it was. I'd left the Pro 1 with Rena halfway up the mountain but just under the soil, about 9 inches beneath the surface was a bright yellow Gold Sovereign. It was so old it had the Young Queen Victoria head on one side... and St George slaying a Dragon on the other. It was in remarkable condition and was dated 1884 - although i reminded myself that these coins were so pure in gold content that they simply didn't rust. There was a little iron oxidization which I cleaned off with the ultrasonic cleaner when I got home and a quick dip in acid, along with the gold nuggets.
Cleaning Nuggets
The nuggets were cleaned with Hydrochloric acid to remove any ironstone and quartz trapped inside the golden, chewing gum-looking shapes. I then photographed them for future reference and to put the pictures on my iPod. I found some large black stones which were very light at the mine. They look and feel like pumice and yet they triggered the X-Terra 70 every single time as a target. I dug two of them before giving up. Does anyone know what they could be? Tin ore maybee? Any tests I can conduct?
Sovereign with Nuggets collected
This is the obverse side of the Gold Sovereign after careful cleaning and a VERY gentle polish with a jeweler's cloth. I am already planning to return to the creek bed to recommence my last digging as there were two targets I was not able to find in time before leaving. I hope to use the pictures I took of the country side with my Pro 1 for creating references for oil paintings which I wish to do.
A 'Farthing' (Penny) - also sporting Queen Victoria
Some of the targets that were dug - during cleaning.
Cleaning junk iron targets via Electrolysis
Cleaning the Gold Sovereign with an Ultrasonic Cleaner
Sovereign - Obverse side showing St George slaying a Dragon
Of the nuggets Rena and I found, the heaviest was just 4.8 grams and the lightest was 0.20 of a gram The smallest one was with the cluster of small nuggets in the clack packed roots of the fallen tree we explored. Not much I guess when you consider the amount of work involved. I can't help but wonder if I should consider another detector or if I was just looking in areas that have already been well worked by others.
Will head out again when I get around to another spell of good weather and another opportunity to return to my previous locations.
If no-one discovers my creek-bed dig, I may return to try to extract the mystery target near the quartz reef. Anyone think I was wasting my time there? Could it be a false signal perhaps?
Does a concave hole give or enhance a bad signal?
There's a few pictures here from this trip if anyone wants to see more of the region and the critters:
http://www.pbase.com/nero_design/pro1_sofala2
--
Regards,
Marco Nero.
