My 5 cents worth.

My 5 cents worth.
Hi everyone. I took my old mate David who is in his late 70’s up to Misery Creek (Ballarat area) today. We had been going up one day a week for over 12 months panning and running my small homemade sluice or highbanker (call it what you like but it works well). Over that 12 months we only found about 14gms of fine gold which didn’t even make petrol money. This didn’t worry me as David is good company and any day in the bush is good for the body and spirit. After the floods earlier this year we thought the creek was stuffed. Everywhere we used to dig was now covered with gravel over a metre deep. We checked out 3-4 kms of the creek and agreed it was a waste of time coming back again. A couple of weeks ago we were at another creek looking around and it also proved to be a waste of time. As it was only lunch time we decided to have another look at the Misery to fill in the rest of the day.
We drove down to another old spot on the creek and found a part of the creek about 100 mts long where the floods had scoured the creek out down to the clay. We test panned some of the small patches of gravel left behind and each pan would produce 10-20 small flakes of fine gold and a few shotgun pellets. So last week we took the sluice up to the creek for the day and ended up with 2.8gms of fine gold which was the best we had ever done for the day. We went back today to do some sluicing but the pool of water we were pumping out of had nearly dried up. We had to dig a channel about 20 mts long and a small pool to pump out of to get the sluice near where we wanted to dig. We were still digging out the same spot we had worked the week before. For some reason David decided to try a spade full from about 2 mts away with his pan and it was full of fine gold. After moving the sluice closer and digging down we found there was a small vee shaped gutter of gravel in the clay about a foot wide and a foot deep. This little gutter is about 20ft long and we have only cleaned out about 10ft so far. This little gutter gave us 3.9gms of gold today. If anyone is looking for me next Wednesday guess where I will by. My sluice is a bit different to most others but we find it very effective as we even catch the very fine gold which is like pepper. Next week I will take a camera and take some photos of the sluice in action. Will post more photo’s next week and give an update on our progress.
Cheers Grumpy (Doug)

Hi, someday. I think i know what im doing but am always willing to listen to good advice from other more experianced members. My old mate David has been chasing Gold since he was a boy and is a good teacher. We did test pan as we followed the gutter, you could take a spade full from the top 6 inches of gravell and get about 20 or so nice specs in the pan. You could skim a spade full of gravell off the clay at the bottem and get the same result. Where we finished for the day the gutter is about 18 inches wide and about 15deep and the Gold appears to be fairly consistant through the gravell. I tried to post a photo of todays Gold with the compulsary 5 cents but it didnt work. Our computer is on a satelite and is so slow, its a pain in the Butt. Something we have to put up with living in the Otway Ranges. Please keep the good advice coming and good luck to everyone with their seach for that elusive Yellow! Cheers from the Grumpy Miner!

hooray I thanks for the help, it is what I had been doing all along but I think it worked this time,
cheers grumpy