When is an Area Flogged?

G'day gents,

a member (sorry, I can't recall the author) recently posed the question of when do you consider an area flogged to the point of being a waste of time.

Someone in turn, replied that depending on the vintage of our detectors and skill in using them, the area is always open for further careful exploration. Well an area here in Rushworth about five minute walk from my shack and over which I walk my dog most mornings, has been open slather for every visiting prospector for as long as I've lived in this town. Consequently I for one have always given it a miss (plus, I like to be away from town and the dog walkers, joggers and horse riders). A prospecting mate was considerably more astute and spent up to two weeks gridding the area which is bare of foliage and resembles a moonscape. Well, he found enough small gold to make the exercise more than profitable. On discussing his efforts he said words to the effect of, 'To cover this area properly gridded would take up to six months. My only problem is boredom. I have to move on after a while.'

Add to this the problem we've all experienced of starting to become lazy after three or four hours for a number of reasons and not properly checking beneath the scrub and whipstick and the situation starts to become more apparent.

I learned something from this bloke and I'll be applying it in the future. I think the 'hobby' has to be approached as a profession if anything is to be properly gained from it. Gridding for as long as you can stand the work and heat - then give it away until the next day or whenever we can stand the concentration required.

I'm not attempting to tell anyone how to suck eggs. I've been in this game - not particularly successful - since '84 when I bought my first detector (Garret Groundog A2B which still hums well when properly tuned) but I'm very much aware there's a heap yet to learn.

Regards

Mike Wellington

Hey Mike,
Mate I dont know if an area can ever be flogged out.When we run out of new ground we allways find ourself back there on these flogged areas.
I would say that if you have removed every scrap of trash and stacked all the fallen timber then you maybe close.But even then there are plenty of pieces that may just be out of range of your current detector.There is something exciting about working a piece of ground that has produced good gold,more so when you have removed all the trash yourself.
One thing i noticed to be common on the goldfields was small areas of trash masking good targets.
I have removed a few nice pieces from in amongst patches of large nails and tins.Once the scrap steel is gone the deeper pieces can be heard.
Also, alot of gold was missed that was hiding around small shrubs and under/between quartz rock.

Mike, I envy you for having been in the game so long. You would have seen the results of the first "super detectors" when they were released! Most people are inherently lazy by nature and want to find the easiest Gold they can access. They'll park their car on the side of the road and potter around with their detector expecting to find Gold there rather than climb over a hill to find a spot that's more remote and less likely to have been scanned 100 times. This reminds me of the Gold Rush in the 1850's. Diggers would grab their shovel and pan and run off to another district within 20 minutes of HEARING about another Gold Strike, only to return and find their previous claim being worked by someone else. Sometimes the area had been worked two or three times before the Chinese found it and then they tore the soil away right down to the bedrock. 140 years later, the humble detectorist can find discarded nuggets in these mulloch heaps and locate nuggets ignored for hundreds of years by people without detectors. First, the early PI and VLF detectors were used to find all the gold previously unlocatable. Then, the deeper seeking SDs and GPs came along and went deeper than the previous detectors, finding plenty of large nuggets. Finally, the GPX detectors came out which offered the ability to seek deeper in more mineralized soils that caused trouble with previous models. That guy you know got bored and moved on to "greener" ground which might have been a good idea but most likely means even he left nuggets behind for other people to dig later.

Someone pointed out that the Gold Bearing region of Queensland is so vast that it would take over 17,000 years of daily detecting for 8 hours a day to cover it all. That that was just Queensland. Some say that an area the size of a football field should take 2 weeks to do it just right. Most experts claim that the slower you go, the more you find.

Finding new ground IS VERY important if you want to Prospect for nuggets. There's always plenty of fine gold in the right creeks and for nuggets, there's plenty of good Nuggeting areas that are unfortunately (probably) located on grazing leases. Remember those two Victorian guys on 'Today Tonight' who found 200 ounces+ recently in an area they themselves have been searching on for a year? I suspect they were hearing from pals who were returning from the same region with the occasional nice nugget because they endured their constant failure for over a YEAR before suddenly purchasing the GPX-4500 and promptly found an patch the size of a large loungeroom that apparently yielded over 200 ounces of FANTASTIC Gold Nuggets and Specimen Nuggets. To find an unflogged patch, or "Virgin Ground", you simply have to find a place no-one has been before. Sometimes this means detecting under a bush or walking onto property that has been owned privately for 25 years or more.

A Prospector is literally someone who looks for NEW Gold Bearing Grounds. Today the term is used erroneously to describe panners, electronic Prospectors (detectorists) and sluicers. But if you can approach a farmer to request permission to access his property, the odds of finding new ground are quite high. Far higher than winning Lotto actually.

I've seen people locate Gold in places that are so aggressively flogged that you wouldn't believe it if you saw it. The most common reason the previous detectors MISSING this Gold was because the target was approached from an an angle that masked the nugget with a false Iron signal (mineralization/nearby Junk), a narrow profile (if the nugget was somewhat flattened), inappropriate detector (for the soil), inappropriate coil (for the mineralization), not overlapping coil sweeps, sweeping too fast, sticking to easily accessed areas, incorrect ground balance etc etc.

Since nuggets are almost always found where nuggets have previously been found, such places need to be investigated with deeper seeking detectors or with a more creative mind to access the targets in the best way possible. As Scratchin4nuggets pointed out: Many good targets are masked by Iron junk. Especially of the iron is dissolving into the soil or if the iron is large enough to cause the detector to ignore nearby legitimate targets.

* If anyone knows which detector model those two Victorian guys were using before they bought their GPX-4500, I'd like to know what it was.

G'day Nero,
you're dead right there re your para 4. We use the word 'prospector' to loosely. Following in someone else's footsteps is hardly in the time honoured tradition of the old time prospectors.

In the meantime there are heaps of areas in this forest area which I believe are unexplored. A backpack with the necessary stores, GPS, compass and map, is all I need to do the necessary exploring. Any takers?


Mike Wellington

A while ago two friends wanted me to take them out detecting for a couple of weeks.
I decided on a spot that had given up a lot of small gold over the past years.
one of them came back into camp with a large smile and a 83 gm bit that had been
only a couple of inches under the ground. No other large bits were found for the trip.
Later in the year my wife and myself were in the area and I pointed out where the
large bit had been found. My wife wandered off with her detector and returned with
a 57gm bit from the same area, this one about 6 inches down.We then gridded but no further large bits turned up.So when is ground really flogged?
Cheers Greg.

I believe an area to be "flogged " when I have lost interest in it. This will not be the case for the next detectorist on the area.

Robert

Never!
Some one always find gold on so called flogged ground!
Scotty

for ever 1000 detectors sold probably 100 are bought by serious detectorists..the other 900 are by people who think wow! that could be a great hobby and use it haphazardly for a few weekends then resign it to the back of the wardrobe.

Recently on a minelab training day at Hillend, a gentleman in his late 70's with his first ever detector pulled out a nice little 6g nugget from just off the carpark at Tambaroora...nearly every detector ever sold in NSW has flogged that spot!

Gday

I guess that most of us have areas that we consider flogged out, and yet from time to time you still get the urge to give it a bit of a go, its probably because our subconcious is telling us to do it as it knows that there has been gold there in the past, it could have something to do with the way it looks or feels etc.

Most new detectorists hit all the known spots compliments to "Gold and Ghostc etc, or from advice from others, not that this is a problem because a lot of these areas are easily accessed and the first base is covered by the fact that the area has produced gold, and these area are a good training ground for the newbie where they soon learn about digging rubbish and bullets etc, and still have a fair chance of getting some pieces of gold too.

But consider this, how many places have you been where you think to yourself about how that spot would be if you could run a scraper over it and take off about 6 inches or so, once all the crap is removed its all new ground, there always seems to be something lurking a bit deeper in some spots, well its the same with using a later model detector, it gives you the chance to get to those deeper bits that were missed before.

So is an area really flogged out, no I dont think so, chances are there is still more gold there than has ever been retrieved, it could just be a bit deeper, and it has to have come from somewhere, it could have shed from a concealed reef or pipe that still remains undiscovered.

cheers

stayyerAU

the other 900 are by people who think wow! that could be a great hobby and use it haphazardly for a few weekends then resign it to the back of the wardrobe.


You're right on this! About twenty years ago I was camped on a nearby goldfield with my sons in a caravan well after dark. I was preparing a curry when there came a knock on the door. At the time it was pouring with torrential rain. On opening the door I saw a very wet and very cold young prospector, detector dragging behind him, who told me he'd lost his car when it became dark. He was a new chum and on his first detecting expedition. I drove him around the area until we found his car, at which time he said that he was heading back to Melbourne - and would I be interested in buying his Minelab 16000 (only used once). I believed at the time I was using a better detector and declined the offer.

This was one very chokka detectorist who was prepared to give up his new hobby because he'd become very concerned over being lost and being extremely wet. Unprepared in all ways. In my own vehicle I drove him back to the Graytown-Heathcote southward track and left him to it. I hope he made it - and hope also that he didn't give up.

MikeW

somewhere in Springhill creek at Ophir is a GP3000 thrown in a fit of anger about 3 years ago by some guy screaming "this is b***s**t!! there's no gold left here!"

Gday Madtuna

Thats really funny, some guys really lose it dont they?, , it reminds me of a story I was told about a lone grave somewhere in the golfields that was the last resting place of one D.Tector, apparently a Garrett ground hog that was too hard to use and the owner cracked the s...s and buried it

cheers

stayyerAU