gold diving??

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Either that or it's an insufficient return to be commercially viable...

Thats probably the real reason.

The setup cost is very high, and returns need to be pretty substantial.
 
just thought I would ask on here to get some ideas about it.

i have been fascinated with the "Gold Rush" show on Discovery for 2 years now. There is no scuba involved but here is what i personally see:

costs

10 man years of labor (5 guys for two years)
100k invested in capital
50K in expenses

yield:

100 ounces of gold
$ ____ in profits from TV show


there are some quality floating dredges online that will quickly arrive at your door if you send money
 
Most people who want to get into mining have this wild fantasy that they will discover huge chunks of gold like they show in the movies. In reality significant majority of all mining yields tiny particles of deposits. When I say tiny... I mean tiny. In large quantities, however they add up.

Commercial applications entail large equipment that follows by trying to extract those tiny particles out of large quantities of excess waste material. Both of those tv shows show exactly how challenging it is to do something like that.

Honestly... I think its more viable to purchase a metal detector and do some beach scouting than it is to purchase a dredge system and a hookah system and then process it.

What I can tell you is that.... SECURITY will be your #1 priority. Gold is at all time high prices. In gold mining there is no honor. If you look back at the previous gold rush that happened in usa... it was always exploitation, theft, murder that followed man's drive to find those shiny metal things.
 
There is more gold in a ton of cell phones then there is in a ton of rocks.

Gold mining tears the heck out of some beautiful country. Nothing like seeing a beautiful valley completely dead with nothing but rock exposed on the surface after a dredge passed thru.

On the other hand in places like the California Sierra's they completely stripped the forest in the gold rush for wood fuel, yet it has come back.
 
There is more gold in a ton of cell phones then there is in a ton of rocks.

Gold mining tears the heck out of some beautiful country. Nothing like seeing a beautiful valley completely dead with nothing but rock exposed on the surface after a dredge passed thru.

On the other hand in places like the California Sierra's they completely stripped the forest in the gold rush for wood fuel, yet it has come back.

Not to mention the silting in of the major rivers and San Francisco Bay.
 
The Bering Sea Gold show is fascinating for the most part because the divers are generally inept. Makes you wonder why there are not larger commercial operators up there with real hard hat divers working?
I suspect that there is not enough gold there to make a large commercial operation viable. Plus, these shows are in large part scripted. I bet the producers went up there and said, "OK, we want you guys to to put together the most slapdash POS boats you can and we'll film you diving for gold. Plus, we'll enhance and/or make up drama for you to enact to make the episodes interesting."
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/teric/

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