Our friend Jay wanted to go camping and dredging for his birthday (even tho he bailed out on the camping over night and left us!!! hahahah). We went to a small river near West Point and went to work. The above picture is the dredge that Jay built. The dredge consists of 2 pontoons, that float the engine and the slusse box. Not pictured is the nozzle of the hose which is 5 inches wide and it can suck roughly 110 gallons per minute.
The Dredging Machine in Action
The motor pulls through water, rocks and dirt through the hose and up to the box. Once it gets to the bos there are a series of screens and settling surfaces for the gold ( which is the heaviest object) to fall thru and get trapped.
The boys moving debris off the bottom of the river, creating a 5 ft deep pool.
The best place to find gold is at the bedrock with is under tons of rocks and debris so the dredge make this easier but sucking the smaller stuff out of the way. The heavier stuff has to be manually moved, sometime with chain and a winch. A fair amount of rocks was moved by kevin and the other boys....there were rocks flying out the the water, Eryn was scared for her life.
Kevin, Todd, Jay and Logan checking out the days bootie
Rick inspecting bits in the filters
Todd and Maddy checking it out. Logan showing Todd His loot
Brenden showing off his Photoshop Fool's gold..Bling Bling! Susie Panning and checking oh so closely for gold.
At the end of the day the filters are cleaned out into buckets to be sorted thru later.
Not all the gold is found after the sorting. Sometime when you are cleaning material from the bottom of the hole you can come across gold nuggets on the bottom. And we found some good sized nuggets. Even Eryn found some gold while she was gold panning...YEY!!!
Jay found this nugget right before the end of the second day...He was taking a picture of another nugget and this one caught his eye..lucky duck
Not only can you find gold in the river there are a lot of other "gems" you can find. Eryn found some Garnet..YEY! You can find mercury ( sometimes mercury coats a gold nugget so it looks silver), lead, and even odd car parts. Anyone have a 1986 Honda Accord?
That night Emily cooked a fab dinner like she always does and Milo cooked up some crawdads he harvested that day. Eryn is now going to be hunting after crawdads while she fishes and while panning for gold...what a multi-tasker!!! Fishing in a river is so hard..many lures went missing in bushes, tops of trees(don't ask) and under river rocks.
Emily BBQ'ing some yummy chicken
Kevin and his fishing loot.
Brenden and Maddy had fun playing on the tire swing, We see a potential future girlfriend..hahahah. Heather giving Logan and Maddy a push.
If only we had equal amounts of gold as we did ladybugs we would be rich. Ladybugs were everywhere in huge piles. Flying and landing on us all day. The USA wimps cried about their painful bites...clearly Eryn and Kevin are tough, after all ladybugs don't even bite! HAHA We gathered a ton of ladybugs and we brought them home for our gardens. We are guessing we got about 5000 ladybugs. Eryn made the mistake of leaving her car door open and they are everywhere inside.
The lady bugs covered our plants when we dumped them in our garden
Saturday night Sage and Milo spun fire for us. We always love watching them and Eryn's enjoys the challange of night shooting.
Milo Spinning
Sage spinning fire...how they don't catch themselves on fire is beyond me
Here are a few more random pictures.
Very beautiful property we were on.
Kevin Undressing Milo...this picture HAD to be shot!
Brenden being gorgeous!
Super cool goggles he got for Easter
Emily and Logan
Too Cute!
We did not become millionaires but we did find about $400-$500 in gold....or so we think. We plan on a return trip in the near future to explore more of the river bottom looking for more gold. It was really nice to spend the weekend with good friends and we are very grateful to the lady who let us use her property.
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