Drywashing for Gold

We have been going out in the desert just about every other day to dig for gold.  We belong to a local club that has several gold claims.  We get out to the claim before the sun rises and get our drywasher set up.  We are usually ready to start shoveling dirt into the drywasher by sunup.  We found this hole that was dug with the dirt piled up alongside it.  We decided to run the dirt from the pile and have been finding some tiny specs of gold in it.  We fill up the top of the drywasher and the rocks slide off to the left and the dirt goes down the chute and pours over the riffles.  The bellows underneath puff air over the dirt and blow the light material off and piles it to the right of the machine.   We shovel and run the machine about twenty minutes and then do a clean out.  The material that is left we pan out to find the gold. 

Everywhere we dig is a little different.  This pile of dirt has a lot of black sand which is heavy and can clog up the riffles in the machine and then the gold can just run onto the ground instead of being trapped in the riffles.  This means we have to do a clean out sooner than we like.  The longer we can run the more gold we are likely to find but with the amount of black sand here that isn't possible.  When we are done for the day we move the machine and rake all the rocks and dirt out.  I take my metal detector and detect over the fanned out material.   I like to make sure we didn't lose track of a nugget.  No luck so far finding anything with the detector.