Clermont the Dud.
In one of my earlier posts I mentioned I was going to have a bit to say about one of the places I visited while on holidays. I expect that my comments are going to raise some argument but so be it. There will be those who disagree with the comments but I'm sure there will be those who agree too. So here goes.
We had travelled through NT, to Qld and as we were going right past, I decided to call into CLERMONT for a swing. While there I met a number of other detectorists and there were those who had luck but many more who did not. [Machines ranged from Garrett to Minelabs and more.]
Those who manage the fossicking in the area have deemed it necessary for all fossickers to hold a current Qld Fossickers License, but you are not told that until you front up to the local detecting shop to pay your money, or to the caravan park where they too, can issue the local kit. [Contents: See below] I don't travel with printing facilities so there was the added hassles of trying to produce the License so it could be sighted by those who would issue my kit. [It begs the question, If there is all this red tape, who polices those who choose not to buy the kit and what are the penalties for not doing so, because there are those who don't buy the kit.
Just on the one day I visited Black Ridge, there were 2 guys who fronted up, read the sign and disappeared without having the paper work, to detect for about 4hrs. [I saw their cars as we left in another location, and they had plainly jumped a fence to detect in that spot.]
And the contents of the kit? Well that's another joke. In it, the kit contains 9 maps of all 9 areas that are deemed GPA's [General Permission Areas] where you can detect freely. What the kit doesn't tell you is that there are no signs of the Old Timers diggings left for you to try to read. In the years since their hard yakka, the ground has been shoved, scraped, dozed and brutalized in many ways so that any possible evidence of their work has been removed. [There's nothing left to read] Even as late as 2 weeks ago, one of the local landowners was on one of the GPA's[not his land] with his dozer, pushing stuff around.
So you might ask, Why the bitch? Well I went well out of my way, to visit this town. All up I travelled over 600 K's to and from, to be told I couldn't detect without my license. Then I was sold a bunch of crappy maps that were worthless for the everyday detectorist. Only the GPA's were deemed go zones, but there were heaps of State Forest areas that seemed out of bounds. Why?
To sum up, Clermont is a DUD, a worthless trip. Oh, it might have been great in years gone by, but today after the place has been cleaned up the only stuff left is small amounts of fly crap, as that local I mentioned called it.
So, if you are considering a detecting trip to this once great producing spot, then choose anywhere but Clermont, Qld.
There will be those who disagree with these comments, as I said earlier, because they were able to find some colour, indeed while we were there, rumours were rife of a 51g nugget found. I will say two things about that. Maybe the rumour was just that a rumour, and maybe the person who found some colour, actually had to jump a few fences to find it..........or he or she was just plain lucky.
Either way, I wont be going back to the Dud place called Clermont Qld.
Feel free to comment.
