DON'T YOU JUST LOVE IT WHEN YOU'RE WRONG First off, since this contest is for those in the USA and not Oz, if the judge thought this story somehow good enough to win, I would like to donate the coil of his choice to Grubstake. I reckon he and his family have been going through a bit of a rough trot lately and I am sure he would provide it with a good home as well as providing the rest of us with plenty of feedback on its performance. Now back to my story. I have a little spot only about thirty minutes from home that I often go to if I need to do a little detector meditating This is in fact the place I found my very first nugget (long long ago). I know I can almost always find a few bits here but as you can see by the photo, they are always veeeery tiny. Anyway, they are fun to find and it keeps the skills finely honed Biggest piece on the scale, the one at the bottom that looks like a bit of wire, only weighs 1.2 gms and the two flakes either side of it won't register on the scale on their own Well another weekend rolled around and as my mate was tied up with honey do jobs, I thought I would ask my better half if she would like to go on a picnic . Low and behold, she suggested that maybe I should take the detector and she would take her camera (photography is sort of more her thing). In fact, here is one of her shots of the easter bunny in camo After arriving at the spot and then having our nicely prepared lunch we both decided to wander off and do our own thing. After only about 10 minutes I had my first little piece (.8 gms ) on the side of a very steep hill. Didn't seem to be anything else here so I thought I'd walk-slide down this hill, cross the lantana infested gully and checkout the next hillside. I had never really paid much attention to this gully before because it was filled with gravelly sand and debris with bedrock at least a meter deep. Since ALL of the nuggets in the area were small, I KNEW I would be wasting my time. Off I go pushing through lantana halfheartedly swinging the my little 11" DD PRO coil ahead of me purely by habit as well as giving any slippery sticks something to strike at before the rest of me stepped on them. (I like to use this small DD in this area because the gound is extremely hot and there are a lot of sticks, rocks and grass to push through. I have found gold at some amazing depths with this coil and although I love large monos I think many foolishly overlook the cababilities of this little beauty.) In an instant the steady hum coming out of my external speaker screamed into overload. #%& rubbish, I thought as I kept walking. After about 10 more steps of wondering if it was a horse shoe or whatever and remembering the glowing looks of appreciation from my wife when I gave her an old set of hobbles I had dug up (she likes that old junk), I turned around and retraced my steps. After easily relocating the general area of the blaring target, I proceeded to uncarefully sink my pick into the soft sandy gravel and then raked out a large pile of same and rechecked the hole - no signal, checked pile - blaring signal! Soooo, I started to rake through the damp sand looking for that tell tale rusty colored stain that iron leaves and casually tossing handfulls of gravel over the top of my coil when suddenly off went the detector. Quickly looking at where the last handful had landed I could see 2 or 3 pieces of coarse gravel but nothing that looked like a bit of rubbish. Reaching over and picking up the coarse bits and paying a little more attention my heart gave a little flutter as one of the muddy stones had that lovely heavy feeling. " Oh, don't be stupid. You know there are only small nuggets here and gold would never be in the top 15cm of a meter of gravel." One quick wipe between the fingers revealed a 40 grammer in all its glory Love it when I'm wrong Needless to say the rest of the day was spent checking the whole gully, lantana and all, as well as the adjacent hillside with no more luck. Back the next day with my mate (who after seeing the 40 grammer) managed to somehow get all his commitments out of the way . We covered a vast area with 4 different coils and I managed to find another little patch(?) in a completely different area. Yep, 3 bits for a little over a gram. No decent nuggets around here. I knew I was right Frank