When hunting for nuggets does not yield any gold for a couple days, it can get pretty frustrating. But it turns into serious mental anguish when it stretches into weeks or months.

I began detecting at the bottom of the gully and started making my way upstream. About mid-way there was a nice, flat stretch for about ten feet.

George was considering filling his dredge floats with closed-cell foam, ensuring that there would be no area available within each float for flooding.

The red dot on the diagram points out where the gravels there were also carrying, but not as much color. The gold was sparse below the point indicated.

When it was all setup and running, you had everything coming off the dredge riffles into the boil box. At the hole section, some of the water got sucked down and pulled a lot of black sand and over heavies…