Sunday started with good news: the sun was shining. Bright sunshine, clear skies, the lot. After the way Saturday finished — trees down on a car, things going past sideways through Leonora — that alone felt like a good day.
So I headed back out to the scene of the crime: the patch where I found the gold on Friday. It seemed a good place to start. Ground that has given up gold once might be talked into doing it again.
On the way I stopped to photograph the Leonora Pharmacy’s roadside sign, which points out that it is the last pharmacy for 1,666 kilometres. The next one is in Alice Springs. I thought that was quite funny. It did also make me think: better check I packed the anti-inflammatories.
At the site, the camera came out before the detector. The quartz with the black running through it — the thing Tony and Lisa told us to look for on the first day — and a few shots of the clear blue sky, taken purely to cheer myself up. It worked.
Then the detecting. I can report the following finds: junk, junk, and lots of junk, with the odd piece of junk thrown in to confirm the presence of junk. I have video. The tub I keep it all in is filling up at a rate the gold has so far declined to match.
The good news is that the pinpointing is coming along. Junk gives a strong, confident signal, and I’m starting to get a little bit of confidence in putting the scoop where the sound actually is — rather than shuffling the target round the hole, which regular readers will know as my signature technique. Every rusted whatsit is practice. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
No gold, so I went back to the car, toasted myself a cheese sandwich, which turned out pretty damn good, and made a cup of tea. Then I sat for a while and just enjoyed being out in the bush. That part of prospecting I have completely mastered.
After that, more detecting, in a few different spots. I’m starting to get the hang of the ground noise. It’s a long, vague sort of sound that refuses to be pinned down — you can’t get a fixed location on it, and when you dig, it just stays the same. Still attached to nothing.
What I’m not 100 per cent sure of is that I’m not just missing every piece of gold. The hot rocks still aren’t showing up the way they did on the first day with Tony and Lisa. They’re simply not coming through as targets. Two theories. Either the ground is still so soaked — Tony’s drying clock went back to zero on Saturday — that the detector is filtering out the small stuff. Or I’m not recognising the sounds, and some of what I’m filing as ground noise isn’t. No way of knowing which from here. The honest version: I might be missing gold.
Very good at finding junk, though. Did I mention the junk?
Overall, a good day. A lot of time on the detector, a lot of country walked, sunshine from start to finish, and no gold. The nugget tally stays at one. The junk tub, on the other hand, is doing extremely well.
That was day eight.