You and your mate hire a Hertz Hilux 4wd and head out into the bush near Laverton (WA) to do a spot of detetecting with brand new Minelab GPX5000s. neither of you do what every other sane prospector would do prior to going out - you prepare.
You start driving around the boundaries of a big gold mine like an absolute lunatic. You stake one tyre, change it for the spare before you continue on and then stake and shred that tyre completely. You turn up a dead end track and then bog the vehicle down to the chassis.
You then leave your car, your food, engel, supplies, etc and set out to detect. But you get disorientated, you ditch the detectors, the camel back, the GPS. You argue and your mate takes off and goes in another direction. You stagger around the bush for nearly 2 days, sleeping out in the bush before finding a disused shearing shed. You climb a tree for a better look and fall out of the tree. After 20 odd kilometres, you stagger into the minesite that was only 3 kilometres from where you bogged your car. Help comes and separately you and your mate are found and taken to Laverton to be checked out at the hospital. You almost die from de-hydration and exposure.
Next day, your mate, another fella and your pregnant girlfriend take off to try and find the abandoned rented Hilux. You drive around for hours in the hot sun. All the tracks look the same.
Total cost of this outing: plane, helicopter, dozen police and 6 cars, medical support from hospital, rented Hilux, 2 dead tyres, fridge full of food gone off in the sun, 2 x $6,000 detectors, GPS and various other lost equipment.
You start driving around the boundaries of a big gold mine like an absolute lunatic. You stake one tyre, change it for the spare before you continue on and then stake and shred that tyre completely. You turn up a dead end track and then bog the vehicle down to the chassis.
You then leave your car, your food, engel, supplies, etc and set out to detect. But you get disorientated, you ditch the detectors, the camel back, the GPS. You argue and your mate takes off and goes in another direction. You stagger around the bush for nearly 2 days, sleeping out in the bush before finding a disused shearing shed. You climb a tree for a better look and fall out of the tree. After 20 odd kilometres, you stagger into the minesite that was only 3 kilometres from where you bogged your car. Help comes and separately you and your mate are found and taken to Laverton to be checked out at the hospital. You almost die from de-hydration and exposure.
Next day, your mate, another fella and your pregnant girlfriend take off to try and find the abandoned rented Hilux. You drive around for hours in the hot sun. All the tracks look the same.
Total cost of this outing: plane, helicopter, dozen police and 6 cars, medical support from hospital, rented Hilux, 2 dead tyres, fridge full of food gone off in the sun, 2 x $6,000 detectors, GPS and various other lost equipment.
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