The Snail is born. My first mini sluice.

Back to the story now. We are fast forwarding a bit. After Mohican I went and prospected Nimeshillen creek. Found nothing but I still had a good time gathering intel on that spot. It was at this time that my lack of equipment finally came to a head. I just said to myself nope can't do it anymore. I went to the local Walmart and bought a pair of knee high rubber boots. I think they were about 25 bucks. Now that the wet feet problem was solved we turned our attention to the equipment. At my shop I have access to all kinds of different doo dads and what nots. I gathered up all the empty 5 gallon buckets I could find. I kept four nice round ones and two square ones. I then took a not so nice round bucket and cut the top part off. I pushed in some 1/8 inch scrap screen I had laying around. Pop riveted it all the way around added handles and eureka we had a classifier that fits in a bucket. I had a way to get at the material. I had a way to classify the material. Now I needed a way to run the material. With a family, two dogs, a mortgage and a car payment dropping money on a sluice was out of the question. I could build one like my engineer buddy that works with me. The problem is that I am impatient at times and I wanted something right then. This is the part where my engineer buddy saves the day. He had the idea to get a flexible downspout extender. They are like an accordion you just pull it apart and the next thing you know you have a whole bunch deep V's. I bought one at Lowes for like 8 bucks. We went back to the shop and proceeded to cut the top off. You can see the end results in the video. Needless to say I was excited and pleased. I saw great potential. When I got home that night I was trying to tell the wife about it all. She was not as excited as I was. Go figure.

More gold stuff

Here is a couple more pictures I had of my Ohio gold in the vial.

New gold spot!

Thanks to Google earth and a nicely timed family gathering I was able to find another spot to prospect. It is not a close spot however. It's a good forty minutes away from where I live. As luck would have it the family gathering we had to attend was close. You can guess what happens next. We cut out early so I could prospect. What can I say? I have a great wife. I had read that there was higher concentrations of Ohio gold in the Knox county area and the river I was on is close to there. Google earth is a great tool for prospecting. I had used it to look for road access to rivers and creeks the week before. I found this spot and one other over in Canton. That one I had not prospected yet but I had plans to in the near future. I started recording and got to work. It was a typical cold Ohio spring day. I did my best to try and stay mostly dry. I needed to make some serious upgrades to my equipment. A fact that was getting more obvious every time I went looking for gold. I needed to get with my engineer buddy at my shop and do something about my stuff. During that time the PaystreakTV channel was starting to get some views and people were liking what I was doing so I was pretty stoked. The bottom line was, whether its big nuggets or small flakes people love gold. Finding flakes that day in a new spot validated what I was doing in my mind. It was a very exciting time for me.