[size=large] I had been using a sluice box to get gold for several years. A gnarly old prospector was my mentor... what a character he was. The old guy was about 70, had been a gold miner forever. He had a set of arms for an old man that was unbelieveable, and blood veins the size of a garden hose running through them. Anyway, more and more I would see guys with metal detectors at the gold fields; I started doing some research and decided to get a Whites V-SAT (Whites machine designed for gold nuggets). On one of my first excursions with the new White's detector I found a gold nugget about the size of a lima bean. I had shown it to a couple of people who were there and more were coming over to look at it; they offered me $100, $150, and on up to $250 for it but I told them it wasn't for sale, why? ... my father in law told me I wasn't going to find anything with that metal detector, and I'll be danged if I was going to sell it before I could show it to him. I went on to find quite a few nuggets, nothing bigger than that one but nuggets none the less.
The gold got me interested in silver (I also found some raw silver in Alaska with a metal detector). I couldn't afford another new detector so I bought a used Garrett made in the late 1960's. I think it was called a Groundhog or something. Man, it was like swinging a fire hydrant. That got me interested enough that I finally got a Whites XLT which I still have today. It was about that time that I started looking on the old Whites forum; one of the first guys I noticed there was this cat named Elson. From there we went to 2 or 3 other forums before we ended up here (Oh, by the way, I still think this forum should be called the Find Mall's Friends and Social Emporium... well, it was something like that anyway.)
There have been a lot of guys come and go on this forum; some were great guys, some not so great. The number of people who used to view, lurk, or participate on this forum have dwindled over the years from about 300 down now to about 100. But I can safely say that everyone who is here now has successfully been assimilated.
Vernon
[attachment 165878 HatchersPass.jpg]
[/size]