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!