Once I started dredging with heated water pumped into my wetsuit, I never went back to not having heat except late in the summer when the water is very warm.

If you have a bad case of gold fever like me, then it’s nice to know that you can get some of that pretty yellow metal almost any time of the year, wet or dry.

When detecting an area that has been cleaned to bedrock and you have new trees growing, always make sure you get your coil as close as possible to the tree. Why?

The prospects I found are known to carry heavy chunks of gold, sometimes in quartz, ironstone, or many times a rusty-looking type of shale covering.

We all love to see that first glimmer of gold when it peeks out from under the black sand in our pan, or feel the weight of a nugget in our scoop when we dig a good target. But sometimes things don’t go quite so smoothly.