Recently I took my Minelab SDC 2300 to a location in Northern California which I hadn't visited in a couple years - even though its not hard to get to - because the last few times I'd been there it was a skunk. I got started and with my new detector and I hadn't been detecting even 5 minutes when I found and dug my first target - and it turned out to be a little nugget. A few minutes later, and the second target was a nugget as well. Initially, I was only able to re-work a small part of this area as I keep digging more little nuggets and I didn't want to walk away when there were still golden targets to be dug. I was shocked to see how much gold was just sitting there in a spot I know I have gone over before at least a couple times in the past.
You can see these nuggets are very rough and have not traveled far. A couple days later I brought a friend out to the place where I'd been digging these nuggets, but the patch I had been working on was starting to peter out. That first morning he was there, I got three tiny nuggets but had been doing much better. However there are loads of workings there and my friend headed up the hill and found some spots up there were he was getting some gold. After lunch we went up there and he took one area and I took another close by. Although we were only about 15 yards apart, there was no cross talk between the detectors. Turns out my area was the more productive of the two, but we didn't know that then, and he got some good gold too. Once I got started, I was just digging one little nugget after the other. I would only be searching a few minutes between finds, and there was very little trash. I think I got a couple square nails and a few bird shot - and 29 nuggets. One of them was a cool kind of arborecent shape that is unlike any nugget I have ever dug, but I have seen some photos of pieces like that. You an see it at the top in the attached photo. The second day we went at it again, and I mostly just kept pounding that same ridge I was working on the day before from one end to the other. My friend found another little slope that yielded some chunky nuggets and he worked there. The weather was fantastic, just enough clouds to keep the temperature just right, great company, beautiful California scenery, and on that last day I got another 23 nuggets and again just a small hand full of trash items.
The total weight for the four days with the SDC was 15 grams, almost a half an ounce. There is still more area to detect, but also some spots that need to be dug and dry washed. So I will be out there with my dry washer as well.
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