I hadn’t had a spare full weekend to go relic hunting with my Minelab CTX 3030 for a month or so since I was lucky enough to find an 1856 Sydney mint half sovereign.

Saturday I had walked into an old mining area in central Victoria which had been mined by hundreds of diggers from about 1852 through until about the 1870’s or so. Normally most of these areas have been detected by someone over the years but I immediately noticed that there was a lot of easy, large non-ferrous targets laying around on the diggings, and shallow, which suggested I may have been one of the first here!

This is always exciting, but rare to find these days for myself. Encouraged by this I spent most of Saturday digging hundreds of old metal objects with some interesting finds including a nice cricket belt buckle and a few silver shillings, among other things. It was a large area and I hoped that if I spent time and dug everything, that I could be lucky enough to find another gold sovereign!!

This has always been on my mind since finding my first one 2 years ago! The Sunday I went back to the same area and it wasn’t long before I had another gold coin in my hand, from only about 5-6 inches deep !!

This time, a beautiful 1858 Sydney mint half sovereign, and in exceptionally good condition. I couldn’t and still don’t believe my luck. I was also lucky to find a nice traders token and yet another cricket themed buckle.