Successful Prospectors’ Tools

Guest Thu Mar 31, 2011 7:28 am

Successful Prospectors’ Tools

Since you are a prospector, you probably now take particular notice of the unending types and means of recovering gold that cross your path. In your travels you will be aware of, and at times actively seeking to find and evaluate, all sorts and types of new or old equipment. From the humblest pan to the latest detector on the market there are hundreds of tools to make you successful in the field.

Keep in mind, though, that they are only tools, invented to help locate and recover gold, but that is all they are. It is up to the person using those various tools to make the best use of them!

The way you approach prospecting plays a big part in your successes. Your attitude towards the hunt is, and always will be, the most important tool in your Prospector’s Tool Box.

The person out in the field must constantly maintain a positive outlook to overcome their occasional setbacks. Thinking “Yes I certainly am going to find gold today!” is the way to get into the right mind set, while thinking “Bugger, only the lucky ones are finding the gold, what chance do I have?”, results in a mental defeat even before you start.

Let’s step back a bit here and have a look at two different prospectors and how they use another Successful Prospector’s Tool – Knowledge through Experience .

Prospector one, “Skipper”, chooses to travel all over the region, traveling from place to place while only spending a short time at each location. Every year he briefly works a new field before moving on to the next place on his list. He is searching for richer fields each trip, yet on his return he wonders why he has so little gold for such a substantial effort.

Prospector two, ”Steady Eddie”, stays to his local fields. He has worked them over and over for years now, and he knows their characteristics in detail. Occasionally he journeys to a location, just outside his boundary, to explore its potential. He may spend a few weeks, or even a month, in that new area, systematically working the ground to learn it’s specific character. On his return home he is quite pleased with his successes that came from the effort he invested.

The big difference between Skipper and Eddie is that Skipper never really takes the time and effort to become familiar with his areas, while Steady Eddie really understands the secrets in the ground he is working. Eddie knows his ground in such detail because he has systematically explored it trip after trip, year after year. He knows the good ground on sight and he also, more importantly, knows how to recognize and avoid the poor ground.

No one can show or teach you all the fine points of your ground, it is a situation where you must just learn them for yourself.

Skipper may get lucky from time to time but at the season’s end it is Steady Eddie who will come out ahead every year.

Another quick “Tool” for your Prospectors’ Tool Box would be proper footwear. Whenever you are working a river sluice, high banker or even just panning, it is paramount that you have the right footwear – and that would be properly fitting gumboots. In the cooler months you need them even more so, as the stream’s water can get quite cold. If you are unprepared you will suffer painfully cold and uncomfortably wet feet.

And now. back to working your ground – and another ‘tool’ for your Tool Box -- Feed Rates going through Your Equipment.

An important thing you must teach yourself is the best feed rate for the unit you are using. If you push too much material through your unit, in too short a time, you will find one or two things happening.

First you may check the unit from time to time thinking “Yes, Sir, She is handling all I am shoveling now”. In fact, what you are not seeing is the momentary clogging of the unit’s riffles. In those few seconds you are loosing a small amount of gold from your unit each time it happens. You can’t see the inefficiency, but the end result hurts your recovered gold. “Slow and steady wins the race“.

Second your unit may be fully clogged from top to bottom with just too much material. What could then happen is that you think you don’t have enough angle, and so you increase the sluice box’s angle to help clear the unit. If you succumb do this, you will increase the speed of the water over your riffle section and blow any fine gold through your unit, and back into the streambed. If you do need to change the angle of your unit while working, it must be done very, very, very slowly, and certainly not in one go. Once again, “Slow and steady wins the race“.

Overall fatigue is a silent killer in the prospecting game! You will loose your edge and enthusiasm on a long trip if you wear yourself out day after day. Also, the type of shovel you should use is, most certainly, a round nosed one, which will offer less resistance when driven into the wash material and will result in a substantially reduced rate of fatigue.

While mining is exciting, and an intense activity, there is a lot to be said for a work schedule which mimics your normal, yearly one of work and rest. Work 5 days a week and then rest, do camp work, restock supplies and do an overall camp assessment.

Thanks to Kaeoj & Murachu for assisting in the documents drafting.

James 101 Cool

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J.B 29/3/2011