Dave,
Well that info from your book, and your experiences don't sound very encouraging. Although I will have to look for that book, as it sounds like it would be interesting. I'm an 'on and off' panner myself, been a few years since I've been out. The only luck I ever had was up in York county, on a small creek, that I can't even recall the name of. A friend and I went based on a little research that we had done, which amounted to getting a bit downstream from an old goldmine. We panned for a couple of hours late one morning, and I found a very small little flake, about the size of a flake of black pepper. We were finding a good bit of black sand so we thought we were on the right track. By lunch it had gotten over 90 degrees and we were tired of sweating and the bugs. We filled up about 25 or 30 5 gallon buckets that we had brought with material from the creek. We exhaused ourselves getting those buckets up the bank to the truck, and it was sitting pretty low when we got it loaded. We set up the next day under the shade tree with a garden hose in a homemade slucebox. We ended up with four more small flakes no larger than the one I that I had panned. I still have them in a little vial of water, once in a while I look at them and laugh. Even though it's all for fun anyway, I'll never forget how hard I worked going through that much material for those 5 little flakes.
Just wanted to share my one and only success story with you, nice to hear from another SC'er. I'm about an hour up I-26 from ya, in upper Laurens County. Jim
