Adventure has always been in my blood. Growing up in south Wales in the 60s, my dad was in the Royal Navy and I used to devour stories like Swallows and Amazons. My mum would often send me out to play in the woods to keep me busy – I suppose you could say I was fairly feral.
As an adult, I kept my affinity with nature. One day in my early 20s, I went exploring in an abandoned mine and came across two people who told me they were gold prospectors.
I thought the gold rushes of the Victorian age were long forgotten. It had never occurred to me there was still gold out there to be discovered. I talked to them for hours.
A few weeks later, I got hold of a gold pan and hitchhiked to north Wales to see if I could find anything. I camped out in the hills for eight days, and spent hours sifting through the river. On the second day, I struck lucky and found a tiny piece of gold. I was hooked.
I found eight small flecks of gold and returned home, excited to show my parents. “Is that it?” my mother asked, looking at the little flecks. My father shook his head and walked off.
To me, gold hunting has never been about getting rich – I see it as a benign quest. There’s something inherently childlike about it. Now, aged 69, there’s still a little boy inside me desperate for adventure. I can go out panning for days at a time, standing in a river, gently searching through the rocks and silt. It’s a wonderful way to connect with nature.
I started to enter competitions, and in 2007 I led the British team to its first ever victory in the World Gold Panning championships in Canada. Ironically, our gold medals tarnished quickly, so were not actually made from gold. It’s an event that’s rarely covered by the press; it feels like a wonderful secret.
You’re given a small area in which the flecks of gold have been hidden, and the winning team is the first one to find them all. The competition itself is fierce, but I’ve made some great friends from around the world.
When I turned 49, I decided to take early retirement from my marketing job and make gold panning a career.
In 2012, I made my most exciting discovery – at the time the largest piece of gold found in the UK, weighing 97g. I was diving off the coast of north Wales where the Royal Charter, a Victorian passenger ship, sank just a few metres from the shore in 1859.
I’d dived at the wreck for 11 years and hadn’t found anything. I had put together a team of divers, and we all worked tirelessly hunting for treasure in the wreck. Then one day, through a crack in the clay, I saw a golden glow. It was about the size of an egg. In 48 years of gold hunting, I’ve never seen anything even come close to its size. It was a dangerous and exhilarating experience, and the biggest adventure of my life.
It could have been worth up to £50,000, but I had to declare it as treasure. All these years later, it’s still with the receiver of wreck – the person in charge of dealing with maritime wrecks – while they decide what to do with it. Some people told me I should have just kept it, but it deserves to be in a museum, to keep the story of the victims of the Royal Charter alive.
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Now, I help jewellers or artists source gold for projects, and teach gold panning courses, as well as writing about my experiences. About once a month, I get a letter from someone saying they want to find gold to pay off their mortgage. I always tell them that if they’re hoping to get rich, don’t bother looking for gold. If I made a lot of money out of it, I’d have paid off my own mortgage long ago.
I met my partner at my office job, and introduced her to gold hunting. Now we prospect together, and she’s probably a better gold hunter than I am. I suppose there are worse things we could clutter up the house with.
It’s fulfilling to pass on this long-forgotten skill to others. My daughter now loves gold hunting, too, and I have young grandchildren whom I take out to the countryside and teach about this wonderful world. I hope it enriches their life as much as it has mine.
As told to Heather Main
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