Here are some outstanding questions I have on Gold detecting from the Daylesford expedition:

My Fisher Gold Bug Pro settings for pretty much the entire expedition were gain at 11 o'clock, threshold at either 11 or 12 o'clock.  I liked to detect with a small constant audio tone. I was very careful to ground balance using Ground Grab often.

1. What happens to the ground phase when gold is present? Increases or decreases?

2. In hot ground should I ground balance to hot rocks?

3. What features should be detected first?
     - ie old dried up creeks
     - bush areas near mine shafts?
     - compacted areas of soil full of rocks in places like pine forests?
     - areas with lots of quartz sitting on the ground?
     - areas with lots of hot rocks sitting on the ground?
     - areas with highly magnetised rocks and soil?
     - areas next to tree trunks?
     - areas with high iron oxide readings on my detector?

4. If I am fully ground balanced, I often get a lot of subtle VCO audio cues - with no target ID in All metal or discriminated mode.  Should I investigate these? In some areas I was in I would get this literally every metre or so, became ridiculous quickly.

5. If I investigate 4. and find that after taking a few inches of topsoil off I still can't get a target ID in all metal or discrimination mode, should I abandon the dig and just put it down to a particularly hot patch of soil?

6. If I do get some target id's in discrim mode, but they are weird numbers like 1 or 80 and moving around everywhere should I investigate or is this again just a hot patch of soil?

7. If target appears to move around - ie target id and VCO seem to trigger in different locations with each sweep of the detector is this a hot patch and should it be abandoned?

8. How do I know what bedrock is and do I need to find it to get gold?

9. This is the ultimate question, at what point does an audio signal and ground phase alteration warrant further investigation?  I did not know what this threshold was so I had to investigate everything which was time consuming and ultimately did not turn up any gold.

The night earlier, I had read that the areas south of Sailor's falls - which I guess is where we had been concentrating our hunting, had been flogged to death. Someone on a forum said they and others had had better luck trying the areas on the side of Basalt road which runs up to Hepburn Springs.

I headed there as a solo mission - found an interesting area of new pine plantations not far from the turnoff onto Basalt road - and had a hunt.  Probably the highest iron levels I have ever encounted.  Beautiful views.  But still no gold.  The area looked like it had been turned over a fair bit but some of the rock formations were spectacular and I was sure were going to yield something - but not to be.

I tried some forest next to it and came up with only shotgun pellets and eventually called it a day by driving to Hepburn Springs for a Sarsparilla and then heading back to base.

And below is the total of mine and Tom's findings - top left is the lock cover which I think takes the cake as the most interesting find of all.  The rocks are a mixture of hot and cold which I have taken to get a better understanding of which should help future prospects. 

After a day out we went back into Wombat forest by turning down Langdon's rd.  Our aim was to head back to the area near Sailors creek road where we had spent time fossicking the before.  However we found a pretty interesting 4wd track prior and decided to pull the trigger and head up that instead.  Interesting area.  Picture below is blurry but there was HEAPS and I mean HEAPS of quartz around this area.  Seemed to pool around trees.  If you cracked through a few layers of top soil there was a slate like floor of quartz below which cracked up pretty easily.

No finds here and Iron count was pretty low, we drove up the road a bit and tried a different area, no luck and decided to head back.

Tom and I were up fairly early and drove to nearby Leonard's Hill.  From there up Sailors Creek road to a nice gully area which, according to Tom's map, had quartz reef's and gully's which could be fruitful.

We spent about a couple of hours working some very difficult terrain which was hilly and full of mineshafts.  There were also some deep holes that looked like they had been made by animals which was a bit disconcerting!

The creek at the bottom of the gully had dried up but it gave us the opportunity to detect the walls of the creek.  Iron levels here were very high and the magnetic rock was off the scale! Tom had a magnet on his pick which we could use to test for magnetic rock and it literally jumped off the ground onto it.  The soil as well.

Of all the places we mined this had the most hot rocks.  My detector was having a hard time staying ground balanced as the phase was skipping around every where.  And there were plenty of signals which were subtle enough to deserve investigating - that once a few inches of top soil had been pulled off yielded nothing more than more hot rocks or a phantom signal which never seemed to improve.  Discrimination mode wasn't displaying much so as always I stuck to "all metal" to improve depth and sensitivity. 

We found a fair bit of trash - Tom found the badge off an FJ Holden.

We decided to move on and drove to an area just off Telegraph road.  We were trying to drive through a pretty dodgy track when we hit a road block.  Tom got out to investigate, and went a cropper on a strategically placed line of barbed wire about 20 cm off the ground between two trees.  Some dodgy prick didn't want us investigating any further.  We cut the line and got out of there.

Can you see the Barbed wire?

We headed back into Wombat forest to the most picturesque location of all. Ferny and had a rainforest feel. Unfortunately, it was the most useless.  There were some areas of red hot rocks but on the whole not much activity.  Iron oxide count was low.  I scouted along the dryed creek bed until I shat myself that there could be snakes in the reeds and headed out.

Headed back to Bellavita and later that night we had a look in the forest next to the property.  Lots of mine shafts here - see the one below was concealed by grass but would have caused a bad fall.

Lots of trash here.  I found a giant horseshoe which looked pretty ancient and must have come off a clydesdale or something similar.  Still had the nails attached!

At this point starting to master picking up on small signals, taking a few layers off to get something more meaningful and then digging deeper.  The horseshoe was about 8 inches down.

Still, like all locations, despite taking great care to stay properly ground balanced at all times,  80% of the digs I did were phantom digs which yielded nothing.  I had Gain at about 11 oclock and Threshold about the same.   However I just couldn't get out of my head the thing I keep reading which is "dig all targets!".   So I did but wasted a lot of time doing it.

The fisher gold bug pro is a highly sensitive machine tuned for small pieces of gold.  Had I discovered a piece it would have gone bananna's no doubt.  But what if it doesn't because - the gold is so far down it's not yielding a big signal?  This is always a possiblity and I guess why they say "dig all targets".  Even if it gets tiring and wears you out.  Speaking of which, at this point the skin on my thumb was starting to blister.

Further to the "dig all targets" mantra - what is a target?  Is it something that comes up with a target ID?  Or is it something which has a good audio signature on the VCO?   I would think the latter as it's a known fact with the GB Pro and probably other VLF detectors - you will not get a discriminated target ID at exceedingly large depth.  The best you will get is a subtle audio cue, and then as you dig you would expect the ID to come to light.

Lots of trash in this area which put up all sorts of target ID's - some in the gold range - I later learned that iron that is heavily rusted and corroded will throw up all sorts of target ID's and this is another annoying thing about trash!

Having arrived at our lovely destination of Bellavita the night before, I awoke at 7a.m- nice and early to get a start on some gold detecting before the kids got up!

I headed out to some promising areas on the property that I had noticed seemed to be deposits of rocks (plenty of quartz) probably put there by the old timers.  The deposits were sitting under a couple of trees and I was hoping to find some gold that perhaps they had left behind.

Bellavita made no secret of the fact it is located on a prior gold mining patch, with numerous mineshafts reported to be on the actual property itself.  I did not see these but the rock "dumps" looked pretty promising.

No luck in the rock dumps.  A few hot rocks and that's about it.  Plenty of metal in the surrounding paddock though.  The signal below looked very promising - 41 on the target ID which I am told is quite often gold on the Fisher Gold Bug Pro.  However the Iron Oxidisation scale on the left is peaking - I have since found out that this is not a good indicator of gold and that gold is normally very low on this scale.

Dug the target and it turned out to be a heavy bolt or something.  Lots of agriculture parts on this property.  Some interesting old nails that definitely look vintage.

That evening we went for a look along the fence line and dug up heaps of trash as expected. However the find of the day undoubtedly went to Tom who with his Whites found a lovely lock cover with the word "Patent" and initials "VR" on it.  This stands for Victoria Regina which is Latin for Queen Victoria. She reigned from 1837 to 1901 - which gives you an idea of how old the item is.

Here is a similar marking I found on google - for a blurry pic of what Tom found have a look at the combined treasures picture from the 28th April post.