Having just returned to Victoria after 11 weeks prospecting in Western Australia, we have cleaned, weighed, counted and admired our golden finds. There was not one piece that would make any national news broadcast, the largest being just over 6 grams, but imagine the fun of un-earthing nearly 1000 small nuggets?

We were shown a specimen weighing 8 oz and a 25 gram nugget found on the goldfields we were detecting, and stories of other larger pieces circulated via the prospecting grapevine, confirming our belief that good nuggets were still out there to be found. Although our Minelab GPX 5000’s proved capable of locating the better-sized nuggets on the last 2 WA trips, we just didn’t walk over any notable ones this year.

One thing that I almost did walk over was a small snake who believed that Spring had arrived on a 16C day in July. I had found a couple of nuggets quite close and resented having to leave that patch of sunlight to him.

We had planned and gained permission to move around a number of mining areas throughout the goldfields, but after only minimal success at the first three, we were fortunate to find an area that was producing much better returns each day, and spent the last six weeks of our time without moving again. For those who are wondering about equipment, we went armed with 12”x 7” elliptical, 12” round and 16” round Nugget Finder coils and Rooster Booster-speaker combinations.

It was interesting to reflect as we looked back through our records, that there was not one full day’s detecting for either of us when we did not find a least one piece each (even if it was only .1 or .2 of a gram), with our best day producing 38 nuggets between us, giving a grand total of just over 11 ounces for the trip.