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The Bear Hug Nugget
If you took a city slicker to some of
the remote Goldfields of Queensland he would get culture shock. Take him to the
top of a mountain and all he will see is wilderness, as far as the horizon. He
won’t see a car or a road, a shop or another human being. Leave him there and
drive away and the isolation would scare him—terrify him in fact. There would
be no tap to drink from. His mobile phone would be out of range. There would be
no corner shop and nobody around to tell him what to do or where to go. It might
take all day for the round trip to the nearest petrol station. Australia’s
isolation can be formidable.
But you take a detector operator who is
camped on the other side of the same mountain.
He feels at home in that scrub. Except for one thing—he thinks that
civilization is starting to ruin the place for prospecting. Twenty kilometers
away there’s the cranky property owner who has threatened to slice his tyres
if he sets foot on his land again. Camped near his waterhole are a few other
prospectors and he feels he has to find the next gold patch before they do. When
he talks to his mate on the UHF radio he uses code words to let him know that
he’s onto gold so the competition won’t find out and follow him. He’s
worried because he’s heard a prospecting Safari might be coming out that way
next month. And only last month a mines department inspector drove up and
checked if he had a fossicking license and asked if he was the operator who
illegally used a bob cat on a goldfield over the Range. The prospector ponders
all this and wonders where he can go to escape the pressure of civilization. So
it’s all a matter of perspective.
Ed and I arrived at one of these isolated goldfields last winter and I had found a few nice nuggets a couple of days previously but Ed hadn’t had any luck at all. I hoped and prayed (literally) Ed would get a decent find. I thought of the old timers during the night and remembered the huge nuggets they had found. I had never found one bigger than 8 ounces although I had found plenty between 2 and four ounces. Ed had too. I wanted us to find a really big one for a change. Some of my customers had. I would listen to their stories of 20 ounce and 80 ounce nuggets and my mouth would water.
“Why can’t it be us this time?” I hoped and prayed. I
didn’t care if it was Ed or me, we shared our gold anyhow. We had met a couple
of prospectors in the area and when we asked them how they were going they had
said that they hadn’t found much. We didn’t necessarily believe them or
disbelieve them. As things turned out, we later found out that they had in fact
found some nice nuggets including one of several ounces and were keeping it
quiet.
I watched Ed for any signs of discouragement but couldn’t see any. He was still enjoying himself, swinging his detector and exploring different parts of the bush. We came across one gully that had been well and truly opened up with heavy machinery.
“Hmm must have been pretty rich for them to do all that work” I thought.
I noticed a number of fairly fresh detector holes scattered here and there in that long broad gully and reckoned that most of those small holes produced tiny slivers of bulldozer blades left behind as the dozer pushed the heavy rocks. The bigger targets would have been detected and removed years ago by detector operators in that obvious spot. I decided I wouldn’t spend any time looking for any tiny bits of gold left behind.
Just as I was thinking about it, Ed called me on the 2-way. “I found a 7 grammer, Jack”
“That’s great, where?” I asked.
“Just on the edge of the scraping, about a foot down,” he said.
That was great, it was Ed’s first
nugget in the area after a few gold-less days. I thought I’d wonder over and
look at the surrounding ridge above Ed.
Fifty metres from where Ed was
detecting, there was a small, shallow reef working surrounded by deep ground. I
was using a GP 3000 and a sensitive 18”round mono which is a perfect set-up
for maximum depth on all but tiny nuggets. I saw a few old detector holes
(filled in) but it didn’t worry me because I knew my gear would probably go
quite a bit deeper. I gridded the area carefully for half an hour around and
below the workings. Nothing. I
remember checking a couple of faint signals but I can’t remember if they were
deep ground noises or deep bits of junk. I decided to detect a flat area a few
hundred meters away near where the Patrol was parked. I had noticed some good
looking rocks scattered about on the fairly deep ground. I zigzagged around the
place, noticing that the ground was improving as I worked away from the track. I
was disappointed to come across cluster of detectors holes that told a story. Oh
well, you can’t win them all.
Being in a new area, I was fishing
around looking for the best ground with as yet, nowhere definite to detect. Ed
hadn’t radioed me which wasn’t a good sign and the day was getting on. I
came to the Patrol, noticing some fresh scratch marks on the metallic duco and
vowed never to buy a prospecting vehicle with metallic paint again. I had vowed
that before but bought this one a bit cheaper at auction. My next 4WD would be
white.
It was a hot day and I was getting tired
so I got in the car and bush bashed over a bit closer to where Ed was working in
the general area. I parked the vehicle and decided to take it easy. I’d had
enough detecting for the day. When we got back to camp I would have to get some
firewood, bucket some water out of the water hole, heat up the shower water and
tip it in the canvass shower—hard work at the end of a hot thirsty day.
I stowed away the detecting gear,
reclined the driver’s seat and collapsed on it, exhausted and hot. I swallowed
some water and thought, “Ah at last! I can rest my weary bones and sore knee,
turn the air conditioner on and wait for Ed.” Just then, Ed called me on the
2-way. “Hey!- I’ve got a signal here and I’m having trouble pin pointing
it. Can you bring two bottles of water, the big pick, a pin point coil and a
camera?”
I thought of the times that Ed had
narrowly missed pin-pointing accurately with his big coil and mostly, it ended
up being junk anyway. I didn’t feel like getting harnessed up again. “Where
are you?” I asked.
“Up the mountain,” Ed’s voice came over the Uniden car radio.
‘I’ve had it. I don’t think I can make it up there,” I said, feeling a bit weak.
“OK,” Ed sounded disappointed.
I rested about for about two minutes and thought about it, “He asked for 2 bottles of water and the big pick. He must be serious.” I radioed Ed, “I’m coming, where are you?”
“Go across, the gully and up the hill for a few hundred yards and then sing out”
“Righto”
I stepped out into the Queensland sun
once more, conscious of my stiff legs and back, but the lure of possible gold
spurred me on. I filled my backpack up with 2 bottles of water, my small camera,
a 10” elliptical Coiltek mono coil and the biggest pick that Walco make. I
grabbed my GP 3000. It all felt heavier than usual. I carefully picked my way
down a narrow animal’s track, down the side of the gully and came across more
of the little detector holes and I was glad that I wouldn’t be digging any
bulldozer slivers that day.
I started up the steepest part of the hike. Hot and sweating, I made it up to the top of the first hill and looked around. I couldn’t see Ed anywhere. “Hellooo” I called out and heard a faint voice in the distance. Aiming toward the voice, I felt my limbs loosening up and the stiffness lessening as I climbed. After a few minutes I called out again and was surprised to hear Ed call out from only about 50 metres away. He was near the edge of the small gully a little below me on my right. I walked over, puffing. “That’s a big hole,” I said, looking down a hole about two feet deep and just as wide.
“You have a go mate, with your detector, I’ve had it. I’ve been digging for over half an hour,” Ed said then pointed to a nearby shallow hole. “I got a signal just there but it was a piece of junk. At first, I thought that this signal might have been junk too, but it’s a lot deeper.”
“Looks like virgin ground,” I said my hopes picking up dramatically as I surveyed the area. We were surrounded by steep sides in three directions. The small but deep gully snaked its way to the top, dissecting the hills either side. Ed’s deep hole was in a small car sized flat on the edge of the gully. The ground didn’t look as if it had been disturbed.
I swung the big 18” mono over the hole and got a huge signal. “Boy it’s a big signal—
I’ll put the little 10” coil on and
try and pin point with that.” I said.
I lowered the little coil into the hole
and heard the GP3000 scream. I tried the sides and the metal target sounded just
as loud everywhere. I couldn’t pin point it so I switched to ‘cancel’
mode. When using this mode with a mono coil, the coil barely works. It’s
designed to work with a DD coil only to get rid of electrical or detector
interference. Whenever I got a huge signal with a mono coil, I’d switch to
‘cancel’ and get an extremely weak signal letting me pin-point within an
inch or two.
I lowered the handy little coil (it’s
the best for tiny gold or crevicing) into the hole. Silence. I poked it into the
bottom. Nothing. I poked it around the edges and sides of the holes. Not a
sound. At least the target wasn’t in the sides.
“Well Ed, we aren’t close enough to it to pick it up on ‘cancel’—I’ll keep digging.
I swung the big pick—my energy had returned now and I felt 20 years younger. The pick almost bounced of the bottom. Gold has got a marvellous ability to revive you. “This is hard rock,” I told Ed. “If it’s gold, it would almost have to be in a reef to be under that stuff.”
“Yeah, look at my blisters,” Ed said.
I ripped into the shale rock and grabbed the loose bits—the hole was too deep to scrape them out with the pick blade. After ten minutes, Ed took over with the pick while I cleaned out the broken up rock and grit out. Down another nine inches, I stuck the pin-point coil in. A faint signal. I traced a line in the dirt, 6” long.
“That’s where it is. We’re getting
close now.” I said, trying not to get my hopes up too high, but knowing it was
a 99% chance of being a big chunk of gold.
We weren’t grinning at that stage
although we were both fairly confident, but we knew that if it wasn’t gold the
disappointment would be as big as the target. We were ripping out the odd bit of
quartz now. We thought it strange to find semi water worn quartz under
sheets of slate.
I was determined not to get excited yet.
I had been let down too many times before. I remembered on two other occasions
when I was disappointed with signals inside quartz. On one occasion I cracked
open a golf ball sized piece of quart to find a nugget of bismuth inside.
Interesting, but disappointing. I hadn’t forgotten the time a mate and I found
a house-sized blow of solid quartz in the middle of nowhere. And we got a strong
signal in it. You could pick up the signal from three feet away from the wall of
quartz with our VLF detectors. We heated the quartz with a bon fire until it
became red hot and waited for it to sheer away. We knew that we were either
millionaires or headed for the biggest let- down in history, but we thought we
were rich. The old timers had tunnelled in the blow apparently found gold. Was it
our turn? The quartz became red-hot fell and sheered away in a great slab and
exposed a thick arm of silvery metal. We were devastated. It only turned out to
be a thick vein of iron pyrites.
That’s why I tried not to get excited
over Ed’s hole. I hated that kind of let down. After I drew the 6” line in
the bottom of the three foot hole, Ed swung his pick and deepened the now
widened hole, avoided striking the target area—we didn’t want a holed
nugget. A hefty chunk of quartz appeared but we couldn’t loosen it at first.
We dug around it and I grabbed the quartz and was amazed at its weight. It felt
heavy, like a shot put. I plopped it into Ed’s eager hands. By then we were
really struggling not to get excited. Ed wiped some dirt of it and looked for
yellow but couldn’t see any. I scratched the quartz with my pocket knife and
saw the welcome gleam of gold. “It’s gold Ed, it’s a huge specimen!” I
said almost trembling with excitement, but we were more stunned than excited. Ed
eagerly rubbed some dirt of it and exposed more gold. He was grinning and his
eyes were bulging.
I mentioned in a previous article that early last year, when I found a 3.5 ounce nugget, Ed gave me a hearty handshake. I wrote that if he ever gave me a bear hug it would have to be a big nugget. Well, Ed gave me am excited bear hug. We couldn’t wait to tell our wives. As we carried the grape-fruit sized specimen down the hill its amazing weight didn’t bother us one bit. I guess it was over 3 kilos, at least half the weight, gold. When we got back to camp and showed the girls they just about keeled over. Sometimes we come back to camp and show them a few small nuggets, occasionally nothing, at times a handful of gold, but nothing like this before. They were delighted. How were we going to weigh it, they wanted to know—my digital scales only went to 350 grams! I found a flat board, measured the centre and balanced it with the specimen one end and an assortment of cans on the other. Our rough weighing method told us it weighed about 2.5 kilos. We guess it was half gold or about 1.25 kilos of gold. We were pleasantly mistaken. Digital scales later showed the grape fruit sized specimen weighed 3.18 kilos with accurate specific gravity tests showing 2.210 kilos of gold! We called it the ‘Bear Hug Nugget’ even though it’s a specimen.
Naturally it’s for sale.
I know you’re not a crook, but you never know, the next bloke might be, so
I’ve got to let him know the nugget is not kept on our premises. We are too
security conscious for that.
How did we manage to find such a big
nugget? Well the truth is you find them when you least expect them. Sure, hard
work and optimism helps. It helps to be able to read the ground and I guess
that’s the most important factor for consistent results. The ground has to be
right and the gear has to be right, but any SD or GP detector would have found
it. In fact when we put the nugget
it back in the roughly 3’ deep hole, we could still get a signal at about 2’
6” above the ground! Which means it could have been 2 feet deeper and we still
could have detected it with careful scanning with the right coil.
Some poor bloke will never know it was
him, but there were fresh detector holes just 20 metres away. In fact Ed found
another 2.5 ouncer and another smaller nugget as well as some nails, close to
the poor blighter’s holes. The bloke must have only dug a few nails because he
gave up too quick. If he had found a nugget he would have gridded the area and
found the gold he left for us.
Later, when we were packing to leave Margaret said, “That’s a once in a lifetime nugget, you won’t find another one this trip.” Was she right?
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