One anonymous prospector has found himself in the box seat after digging up a 63-ounce specimen on the outskirts of gold rush town of Ballarat.
‘‘He’s has already received offers of $160000 for the nugget, which he’s named ‘You Wouldn’t Believe It’,’’ Gold Ballarat operator Mark Day said.
‘‘I’ve been in this business for 25 years and this is the biggest find we have seen by one of our customers — that they’ve told me about anyway.’’
The happy prospector, a retiree, has been metal detecting for a while, but had not been able to give it as much time as he would have liked.
‘‘He uses a Minelab GPX4500 and recently came into our store to upgrade his coil to one that was a touch more sensitive,’’ Mr Day said.
‘‘It certainly worked for him because he came back with 42g of nuggets, which made him pretty happy.’’
A short while later, the prospector contact Mr Day and asked if he was interested in buying some ‘big gold’.
‘‘I said I wasn’t a buyer and asked him what he meant by big. He said 2kg and I just said ‘You’ve got to be kidding’.
‘‘When he showed me the nugget here in the store, he was shaking like a leaf. He didn’t know what to do with it. He hadn’t slept in three days,’’ he said.
The nugget was found about a 1m down in old pasture land — below 30cm of wash and about 15cm of hard clay.
The location was within 150km of Ballarat, with the prospector keeping the specific site a secret.
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