Chasing solo nuggets.

Me and a couple of mates spend a lot of time on the ground looking for our dream patch to work together the talk often comes up about finding a solo nugget all by itself in the middle of nowhere and well away from the known old diggings. I have enjoyed such an experience when we worked unfamiliar ground a couple of years ago and found a 28 grammer at 6-8 inches below and 100 metres off an ironstone reef. There were no other diggings anywhere remotely nearby. We grided the area for a couple of days and got zilch. My mate has found several solo nuggets over the years in out of the way places. Has anybody got any theories why these single nuggets seem to be sitting out there seemingly all alone just waiting to get pinged by default.

G'day trianglemal, have asked myself the same question heaps of times before finding a sinlge nugget in good looking ground in out of the way places.
A couple of reasons that come to mind, if its Granite country, geologically very old, gold might have come out in one spot off the reef but over the million odd years its probably spread kilometres wide and far.
Or the other reason, simply someone has beaten you to it .

I also find in Ironstone country nuggets could be few and far between, but are generally bigger.

Hi Guys,

Another non geo reason for these nuggets might be related to our Aussie wild life??

My brother own a far which is about 1pm away from a private golf range. Time and time again he is recovering golf balls from his paddocks. He originally thought they must be bloody good golfers until he noticed a crow with a ball in it's mouth. From that day on he kept an eye on the crows and sure enough he noticed crows flying with golf balls in their mouths. Research revealed that it is common for birds to steal round or shinny objects.

Case number 2 is a few years ago we pulled up some rabbit and wombat ( sorry mate ) holes and we notices all sorts of junk in the burrows. Not sure if the eat it and then poo it out or just take stuff back to play with??

Anyway, this might be one reason that is not geological, why nuggets might end up far away from their origin ??

IMO

Peter

Finding a solo nugget in surface soil is one thing finding a solo nugget close by a ironstone reef is another story , you need to take a good look and at that reef and research that area well, you are missing the clue which must be look straight at you.

Look at your Geomaps for that area , step back and that a wide look at the landscape how it has worn down ,which way ,what pitch is that reef line, is it true north and south if not , is it pitching 20% to the west ,does it mean some were else with a Quartz's Vien /Dyke, does it have a Quartz's/Dyke stone mix.

If it is in a Gold bearing area then you have a very good chance of finding lots more.

I can tell you one place that give up lots of gold off Ironstone Reefs (Beaufort)

Good luck in your search just hope I have fired you up again on your location.

You need a over view like this

I can verify the crow stealing golf ball story - one of the buggers took mine after a nice drive, ended up on another fairway and the bastards I was playing with made me play it from there...

Cheers,

Goldy

Actually those nuggets belong to me. You see, I was returning to my car from a successful day detecting just near there, and unbeknownst to me the nuggets fell out of a hole in my pocket....

G'day Trianglemal.

Some people say that gold found on a near by Ironstone reef area might not amount to much in terms of quantity,but what you do find is normally big in terms of size.I say there really is no one fundamental law to support this theory.I've found an Ironstone reef patch a while back which produced about 20 small rough and jaggered looking gold nuggets mostly covered in Ironstone,in an area measuring 3x6 meters,ranging from .2 grams all the way up to a 7 grammer. One thing I'm certain of is that even if you find one bit of gold on any flat worked or unworked,area,that area,if covered by derbri,such as leaves,twigs,small rocks etc should be raked to a clean flat surface,to at least 3 meters radius from the original find.You'll be surprised at what one misses (on hearing) an inch or two above the derbri.
Gold that is found to be rough and jaggered,you can bet that it hasn't traveled far from its original source(sometimes only a few meters maybe).Now as for the original source,well that will always be a bit of mystery,for I've also found in the past that even though you might be looking at the most obvious signs of exposed reefs or loads of ironstone/quartz,visible to ones sight,that might have you believing the gold has shed from there,might not necessarily be the case,for there might be multiple gold bearing reefs around the nearby vicinity which have withered away through weathering,and are no longer visible to the naked eye,also shedding their gold deposits nearby.One last and final step if you could be bothered,dig up the ground 1 meter radius from your original find,to the same depth as your original target and see if anything else pops up.By doing this,it might not guarantee you more nugget finds,but at least you'll have piece of mind,that nothing more lurked in the nearby vicinity of your initial find. Anyway enough of my waffle.

Cheers guys kon61.

Trianglemal You will not believe it but that nugget in the photo is almost the same shape as the one my wife wears some times, but hers only wieghed 7.7gms
Well done in your find.



Wombat

Bill

I would keep one eye on your Wife

Detrackozi you should recognise that nugget, it is the one you help me find

Wombat

Kon61
I have such a place and have been thinking to do this,the depth is 6" and the area is about 4sq mtrs so I will try tomorrow.Unfortunately I went to change the tape on my 17x11 today and the coil fell apart,the glue has failed so it has to go back under warranty.I'll try the good old 11"mono and let you know how it goes.
Steve

What gets me is how you actually do
find that only bit in a gazzilion acres...

Alan WA wrote:What gets me is how you actually do
find that only bit in a gazzilion acres...

maybe with a long range detector ?

Gday

Finding the solo nugget on open ground is one of the many banes of this hobby, I honestly could not say how many nuggets I have found on open ground and then even after working the area over and over never found another scrap nearby.

But on the other hand you simply have to do the exercise as there have been many places that I have also been able to find more gold, sometimes you have to be a bit creative in your way of thinking, and try to imagine by picturing the lay of the terrain from which direction the nugget may have moved, if the nugget is well worn then its safe to assume that it has travelled and it could possibly have moved several klms, if the nugget is jagged and rough its near the source so you need to make a concentrated effort to see if you can uncover it, the piece you have found may be the tip of the iceberg so to speak, an you could be walking away from many ounces of gold.

This is one of the many problems of detecting, people who pick up the odd piece here and there and then move on are actually removing the indicators that could alert a savvy prospector to the possibility of a rich source in that spot, with nothing to indicate that the gold is in the vicinity there is little or no chance of anyone else stumbling on to it unless they are loaming or soil sampling, if you have worked spots like this then it is always worth re visiting the area when the conditions are different, or you have the time to expend working out in different directions from where you found the original pieces, and if you do find more pieces then you start to work out a direction of travel, nuggets tend to fan out from the source so the further away from the source the wider the fan an the further apart the individual pieces will be.

Many changes to the terrain would have occured since the gold was shed from the source so it can be a hit and miss process, a lot of what you are seeing on the ground are concentrates, the left overs from features that have weathered away over a billion years, some areas are geologically a lot older than others so in some areas its more common for the gold to be found relatively near to features that still exist, and not so much out of the flats away from them, so once you have realised this factor then you know to concentrate your efforts in the vicinity of any features first, then do the same on the flat open areas.

Some places are so old and weathered that the gold is widespread and can be found anywhere, so even walking the open ground can be worthwhile, sometimes its worth remembering also that if the ground looks good to you then it would also have looked good to any other prospectors that have been there before you so they would have also had a crack at it too, and any odd nugget that you have found may be a leftover from a worked patch as well and simply missed, this is not a bad thing as some early detectorist were quite lazy and missed or ignored a lot of the small gold, and sometimes the earlier machines simply didnt see it.

Another not so well known fact is that an Emu will pick up and swallow nuggets, they swallow rocks and poop them out, it aids with their digestion, so it is also possible that a nugget that is sunbaking and looks somewhat worn and shiny may have been dropped out of an emus butt so dont whack it in your gob for a quick clean as a mate of mine did, he looked a bit after I told him about the emus

cheers

stayyer AU

Thanks Stayyer a very informative piece there.I returned to a small patch this morning where I had found about 5 good bits close together all about 6" deep.They were really coarse and I have also found about 20 specis and small nuggets within 5 meters of this in disturbed ground.Right next to the patch is a large deep digging with a rocky outcrop in the centre and two shallow diggings on the opposite side of the patch.Tried to dig a bit this morning but too hard to remove any surface material.
Where to go from here?What you said about the nuggets being close together could indicate I,m close to a source but the rest of the ground surrounding this has about 1 foot of overburden or tailings.One section of tailings maybe a few ton is most likely over the top of the rest of the patch.Doh!

Detrackozi wrote:you are missing the clue which must be look straight at you.

Look at your Geomaps for that area , step back and that a wide look at the landscape how it has worn down ,which way ,what pitch is that reef line, is it true north and south if not , is it pitching 20% to the west ,does it mean some were else with a Quartz's Vien /Dyke, does it have a Quartz's/Dyke stone mix.

If it is in a Gold bearing area then you have a very good chance of finding lots more.

I can tell you one place that give up lots of gold off Ironstone Reefs (Beaufort)

Good luck in your search just hope I have fired you up again on your location.

You need a over view like this

Thanks Detrackozi with the good advice and Yep....I am fired up this year to have a real dip at some good geo areas in the triangle that might produce an odd good nugget or two and we are thinking of places to explore that might seem just a little bit out of the way. I follow your 20% rule religiously. Most of our time now is spent chasing old reef systems looking for the nice piece of ground that might have been missed by someone else. Hence the hope of finding a big solo nugget somewhere just under the ground. I am curious to know what a quartz/dyke stone mix looks like Detrack?....have you got any pics or refs I can look at? And how did you show the relief views on your mapping like that. Now that would be a big help as well?

Wombat wrote:that nugget in the photo is almost the same shape as the one my wife wears some times
Wombat

Hi Wombat.....I had no hope either when I brought the 'L' nuggy home...My wife's name is Lynne.....It was a no brainer.


I can only dream about finding one shaped like a triangle one day


And a big thanks Kon61 and to the Stayer for taking the time to post their most informative replies. I cant thank you enough for sharing your knowledge and what you say does make a difference in the way I approach my prospecting. Some of this is beginning to make more sense and so improve the pleasure that prospecting brings.

So, the moral of this story is - If you find a nugget which looks like a letter of the alphabet, and there is some loved one who is quite capable of taking it off you if they share the same initial, break the bugger up!

bedrock wrote:

Alan WA wrote:What gets me is how you actually do
find that only bit in a gazzilion acres...

maybe with a long range detector ?

Sometimes I think we have a built in one....

trianglemal

I Will look at my photo's

Quartz's -Dyke that you will find in many of our Goldfield will look like BIF on each side of it with a Quartz's seam in the centre as if it had been put in a Sandwich if you look at your 1-50-000 Geomaps maps look for the Geofeature (Magnetised Dyke ) drive out and have a look around these and it will give you a good insite on what they look like.

Jefgold will be able to relate to what a Quartz's -Dyke looks like as he and two others worked the most south end of one a few years back and a very large shot of gold had come from this patch .

The gold came out like this and there was alot more that come from the area and not one bit of old time workings





Bill (Wombat) that nugget may have been a Solo on that day we were there but there was many more taken after that , Not sure if you remember the area that well but just up from your find there is also a Quartz's-BIF outcrop there that area needs a good search with some big coils

Dave I have been back to that spot with the 5000 with 11" mono on but no luck. Sent all day there but just a couple of bullets. I have not tried it with a big coil yet.

Wombat

Bill

That's one thing that you never find as a solo find and that is those 22 bullets if you found them then the area is still not clean up from the outcrop on that hill too the north east is a very big area and alot of small bush about.

For you not that far away now that you live there make a plan do one area once a week just so you do not get sick of the same spot it will only be a matter of time before you hit the next nice one and you can put that one around your neck

When we were detecting we always ran detector over emu poo. Emu's love to pick up anything sparkly or different and will poop it out many kms from where they ate it

As stayyer AU commented on. I have a question. What would be good ground to look for when out and about?.