I was really looking forward to prospecting at Contrary Creek this weekend. I spent the last two weekends in Nags Head and was dying to get out and find some gold. Butch, Kylene and I pulled into the parking lot and we saw little Buc's pick up. We correctly deduced that LG wasn't with him since we didn't see the van or the 4 wheeler, and we knew he was only allowed to drive the little truck when LG wasn't with him.

Then we decided that this was the perfect opportunity to sneak down the creek and catch Buc in the world famous and renowned, Polly's Cove.

We loaded up dredge number one and drove silently down the creek making sure to stay in the water so Buc couldn't hear us.

After about a half mile, we parked the ATV and held our shovels in our teeth while we swam through the deepest parts of Contrary Creek in search of Buccaneer and Polly's Cove.

Finally, after what seemed like hours of treading water and swimming between the multitude of aquatic creatures, we spotted Buccaneer.

He was huddled over a gold pan and muttering to himself.

We got to a shallow part of the creek and waded ashore, the only thing on the great expanse of a gravel bar between us and Buc was one little scraggly pine tree, it only had 3 branches.

Surprisingly, he hadn't seen us yet.

Our stealthy sneaking up skills still intact we crept to within 20 feet of Bucaneer, as we quickly loaded the GPS co-ordinates into our handhelds, thinking we finally found Polly's Cove, he turned around with a sly smile and laughed,

" Heh heh hehhhh... don't even bother folks,
this ain't Polly's Cove. You'll have to get up eaaaarly in the morning to catch me on Polly's Cove."

Ahh well foiled again, we decided to set up camp and prospect here anyway. Here's how the rest of the weekend went:

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Butch brought part of his circus tent to set up and provide some shade. Typical of Contrary Creek, the shade managed to even eluded the tent

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Since Buc has never dredged before, we put him on Skull Mariner for 5 minutes. Either I was hit in the back of the head with a shovel or i must have blacked out because all i know is Buc shaking me to wake me up to tell me the dredge ran outta gas. He still claims he only ran it 5 minutes

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Butch began setting the Bigg Eg up

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Seeing a hole deeper than 2 inches, Butch decided that Buc's dredge hole would be perfect for his foot valve

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Here's Butch and Buc dredging away. I think Buc kind of likes dredging and he shared with us how he was going to TELL Lady Garnet that he was buying a dredge next weekend.

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Here's an underwater shot of Buc dredging

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Here you can see some of the material coming out between a couple rocks

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Originally the plan was to sink a hole for the foot valves, but when we saw the quartz vein sticking out of the saphrolite we decided that this looked like a pretty good hole

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Here's a shot of Butch and you can see how much material we moved to get to bedrock

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A shot of Skull Mariner at work

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Here's the circus tent on day two

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The underwater vortex created by the Bigg Egg

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Butch showing his hands free dredging technique. This is around 2:30 on the second day. The water temperature hit 92 the day before and 94 today. We decided it was time to quit. It didn't really seem that hot, but for some reason the water temp really sky rocketed today.

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We hit 2 quartz veins. The quartz was surrounded by the black cystaline mineral. The black matrix was loaded with garnets

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Here you can see the black matrix and all of the garnets in it

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A small sample of the thousands of garnets we found in this vein

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Part of my clean up, the pickers i picked off the black matt the previous day, the fines from quick panning my concentrates on Sunday, I have yet to do a full clean up. The question is though, was the gold in the quartz vein...or..in the over burden? You decided :)

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As we hauled dredge # 2 back at the end of Sunday, we were to learn why our water was so hot. It seems someone decided to build a dam and keep all of teh cool water to themselves

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The culprit turned out ot be Caver Pete...saying....." Hi Guys" :)

Tinpan