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There are several good reasons to team up with one other person in a gold
dredging operation. One good reason is safety. A dredging accident is less
likely to be fatal if there are two people on the scene keeping an eye on each
other. A buddy is also able to offer a huge amount of assistance when it is time
to move gear around during the sampling stages. Still another good reason to
have a partner is the moral support that two persons can give each other when
you are just learning to sample.
It is true that two dredgers are likely to finish off a pay-streak around
twice as fast, with only half as much gold going to each person. But it is also
true that two motivated people tend to spur each other on to get more
accomplished - as long as both of you are hard workers. It can be much easier to
locate the pay-streaks when two people are sampling and seeing it through
together. And one other thing: In gold dredging, there can be some
amazingly-good moments which carry an incredible emotional impact - like when a
very rich deposit has just been discovered and the first bit of high-grade is
being dredged up the suction nozzle. These are experiences which could never be
wholly communicated to and understood by most others, so it is nice to
experience them alongside someone else.
Most pay-streaks can be dredged up with two dredges working side by side. To
try and mine pay-streaks with more than two dredges at once can become unwieldy.
It can be difficult to mange a third dredge (knocking out plug-ups or whatever)
when it has other dredges tied to both sides of it. Under the majority of
conditions, two-person teams are better than larger-sized group dredging
programs. By that, I mean that the individual dredgers are likely to end up
recovering more gold.
PARTNERSHIP DEALS
 There are several ways that two people can team up in dredging: They can form
a full partnership and find, recover and split up all the gold equally between
themselves. They can form a more limited partnership, helping each other to
locate the deposits; and then clean them up together, with each person keeping
what he or she dredges up. Or, they can form an even more limited association
whereby they agree to help each other move gear around when needed, with each
person finding and recovering his own deposits. Each of these different
arrangements has its own advantages and disadvantages, and each can be
most-optimally used under different sets of circumstances. It is good to be able
to shift from one of these arrangements to another, depending upon what the
situation is.
Teaming up with one other person on a full 50/50% partnership basis is done
best when both dredgers are of relatively equal dredging and sampling ability,
when both are willing to put equal amounts of time and energy into the operation
and when both have about an equal share of financial investment into the
program. Just by nature of the way gold affects people, if the gold being
produced by an operation is going to be equally split up, then the amounts of
input into the operation should be reasonably equal, too. Otherwise, dissension
can occur between the partners.
The more gold that is being recovered, the more that the inequities tend to
express themselves. This can happen in varying amounts, depending upon the
relationships, how much gold is being recovered and how far the exchange of time
and energy has gotten out of whack between the people involved.
I was dredging on a 50/50% deal with another dredger in a moderately rich
pay-streak not too long ago. We each had our own dredges in the pay-streak side
by side, but I was recovering two to three times more gold every day than he
was. This can happen once in a while in a pay-streak when one guy will uncover a
richer section of pay-dirt, but this was happening every single day!
The water was very cold, and it was towards the end of a long and
hard-working, successful season. We were both kind of burnt-out, but I had set a
quota for myself to put another pound of gold into my poke before knocking off
for the season. The gold was there; I just needed to dredge it up. My buddy
needed the gold too, but he was more burnt-out than I was. The only reason why
he had not called it quits for the season, he said, was because I hadn't.
One day we sat down and I told him that I only wanted one more pound before
ending off; and that I wanted to go after it on my own - keeping what I
recovered, and allowing him to keep what he recovered. Since the pay-streak was
just as rich on his side as it was on mine, and since he was an ethical man and
close friend, he could see the fairness in what I wanted to do. So he agreed,
and we started dredging side by side, each of us keeping what gold we recovered.
Well, you will never guess: I started recovering a little more gold than I
already was, and my buddy started recovering about three times as much gold as
he was before! The pay-streak did not get any better over there. We just changed
a working agreement. This is fruit for thought.
GRUBSTAKING
 There are various ways that different people can contribute to a dredging
operation to keep the input relatively equal. One person may have the equipment
and the experience, while another person might have the money to finance the
operation. Full partnerships under these circumstances can be made to work more
often when both parties are equally willing to put time and physical energy into
the operation.
Those kinds of deals where one partner is going to put up the money and end
up with half the gold, while the other person does all the work, generally do
not work as well. Be careful about agreeing to a partnership on an equal basis
with somebody who is not going to put in his equal share of dredging alongside
of you. Since you can really only put in so many hours a day at dredging, there
is still plenty of time left over to clean-up, cook, repair gear, and do the
other necessary things around camp. So there is no good reason to give an equal
share of the recovery to someone else to do these things for you (unless it is
your spouse or mother). If you do, you will be feeling the pain out of your own
pocket.
Grubstake deals seem to work out better when the percentage to the silent
financier is kept down to about ten percent or less of the gross find. Unless it
means not going at all, you should try and avoid having to give any more
royalties (especially of the gross recovery) away than you positively have to.
As mentioned earlier, the larger cut of the pie you cut out for others, the more
pay-dirt you will have to pass up that would otherwise be acceptable dredging.
Unless some very rich area has already been located and just needs to be
dredged up, an absent financier and claim owner will likely make more gold in
the long run if the amount of gold the dredger needs to pay out is kept down to
a minimum reasonable percentage of the recovery. This way, the dredger is less
likely to go broke.
I met up with a guy in Alaska who had agreed to pay a grubstaker 50% of his
gross recovery, because the grubstaker had sent along enough groceries to last
the dredger all season. Now let's see; that's 50% to the grubstaker, 10% to the
claim owner, and the dredger still had to pay his own travel expenses, fuel and
other operating expenses and repairs. How was he going to make any money for
himself? He didn't, and neither did the grubstaker! And the worst of it is that
he was into a very nice pay-streak, which he had to leave behind for someone
else to dredge up.
In some partnerships, one person may receive a higher percentage of the gold
recovery because he has put more into the operation than the other. Regardless
of the agreement, and how right it is, when split-up time comes, and one
person’s pile is larger than the other's pile, both people are likely to feel a
little odd about it. This comes into play more when large quantities of gold are
being recovered, making the difference in piles even more noticeable. This is
the way it is with gold. Plan on it.
On that note, when forming partnerships, and the contributions are not all
equal, it is common to allow 10% of the gross recovery to whoever owns the
mining property. It is also common to allow 10% of the gross recovery to whoever
owns the dredge. This is an exchange for putting up the capital for the main
elements required to start a mining program. If someone is putting up the money
to keep everything going, rather than a percentage of the gross recovery, if you
can swing it, it might be better to just agree to pay that money back (perhaps
with a little interest) right off the top of the gold recovery. Then the guys
who are doing all the work usually split up the balance.
OVERMANNING AN OPERATION
One non-optimum way to set up a full partnership, is by teaming up on a small
or intermediate-sized dredge with a second person who does not have an
additional dredge to operate. One dredge can only process so much material in a
single day. Two dredges of similar size, coordinated properly, ought to be able
to double what one dredge can do by itself, as long as both operators are hard
workers.
If you take on a partner using a small or intermediate-sized dredge, without
also having a second dredge for him or her to operate, you will probably make
less gold than you would if you just work alone.
There are exceptions to this, like when developing a high-grade gold deposit
in deep streambed material where there are a lot of cobbles to be moved; enough
to keep a helper productive full time without getting into your way. Another
exception is when operating a large dredge, when it is a two-handed job to move
the nozzle around. This creates the need for a helper to move the cobbles and
boulders out of the way.
When two people are put to work on the same dredge, they need to be able to
process at least twice as much volume of streambed material through the dredge,
and recover twice the amount of gold. Otherwise, the arrangement becomes
inefficient, and the team might be better off operating two separate dredges, or
take separate shifts on the same dredge.
In theory, you might figure that if one person can move a certain volume of
material with a dredge, then two people working together on the same dredge
ought to be able to move twice as much material. Sometimes this is true. If
conditions are right for it, a well-orchestrated team underwater can process
much more than double what either person could accomplish on his or her own. I
have devoted a substantial discussion to underwater teamwork in Volume 2 of
Advanced Dredging Techniques, so I won’t go into that here.
If there is not enough work to keep a second underwater person productive on
a dredge, without the person cutting into the nozzle-man's production and
slowing him down, then it is not a good idea to put a second man there. What do
I mean by cutting into the nozzle-man's production? When a second person runs
out of productive activity to keep busy, to stay busy, the person can start
moving cobbles that are not ready to be moved. In doing so, streambed silt will
be released into the water. Then if not immediately sucked up, water currents
can cause that silt to spread around and cloud-out the hole. Then the nozzle-man
must wait until the water clears up enough again that he can see what he is
sucking into the nozzle. This is just one example of how a second person can
actually slow down the production in a dredge hole.
As an example of an overmanned (and therefore underpaid) production dredging
operation, I teamed up with two other guys one time in a sampling activity to
locate a pay-streak. We found a very nice one which was sitting underneath about
two feet of hard-packed material over top of some really rough and irregular
bedrock. The pay-streak was about 45 feet wide; so there was no problem placing
our two dredges side by side to clean it up the gold.
We were each operating 5-inch dredges. Our partnership agreement was that
after working together to locate some high-grade, we would develop the deposit
side-by-side, keeping our clean-ups separate. I was running my own 5-incher and
keeping all the gold that I found. The two of them teamed up on their 5-inch
dredge and were splitting what they found equally between the two of them.
The streambed material was very hard-packed, and the water was moving pretty
fast. A deep orange-colored silt in the material made it necessary to take apart
the streambed in an orderly fashion, sucking the silt and material from the same
spot that you were moving cobbles. Otherwise, that part of the hole would be
entirely clouded-out by silt, and you would have to wait for a half-minute or
more before it would clear up enough that you could see what you were doing
again. This is standard operating procedure in most dredging situations, anyway.
The hole we were dredging was so wide, that if I clouded myself out, their
side would still remain clear enough that they could continue on dredging, and
vice versa.
Since we agreed that each would keep what we separately recovered, and agreed
that each could spend as many hours at it as we wished, the game was to produce
like mad to dredge up as much gold as possible before the other guys recovered
it. The friendly competition between us really spurred us on. Those were some
hard-working guys and they surely kept me moving all the time, me knowing that
they were dredging up all that gold as fast as they were. They had teamed up on
their dredge and were going at it hot and heavy on the other side of the hole.
But at the end of each day, my tailings pile was at least twice the size of
theirs, and I usually had twice as much gold, too. Sometimes more!
In wonderment at this, I slowed down enough one day to have a look at what
they were doing. Sure enough, they just kept clouding each other out. In 2
1/2-feet of material, there just was not enough work to keep two guys
effectively busy on one dredge. I then went over and watched myself dredge, to
see what a second man could do to help me get material through the nozzle
faster, and there wasn't much. I was pouring it through about as fast as it
could be done most of the time.
The best bet for those guys would have been to split the day into two shifts:
One starting at daybreak, and the other one ending at dark. In that way, each
one of them would have ended up dredging about the same amount of gold that I
dredged. As it was, they probably would have about doubled their gold intake if
one of them did not dredge at all! This is something to keep well in mind when
organizing a dredging operation.
SPLITTING UP GOLD
My various partners and I have worked out a method of splitting up gold over
the years which has always seemed to work out very well. On group ventures where
everyone involved is getting some share of the gold we recover together, all
recovered gold is deposited into a group collection jar. We pull out any and all
pieces (nuggets) of gold that seem to be of extra value, and put those into a
separate group jar. We split up the nuggets at the end of the venture, because
there will be more of them then, so everyone is more likely to get a more fair
portion of them. The rest of the gold (the fines and flakes) are split up on a
regular basis. We do it every day if there is enough gold to make the effort
worthwhile. Sometimes we classify the gold through window screen, and measure up
shares by weight of each classification to each partner. If any partner is to
receive some lower or greater percentage of the recovery, the person will
receive it in both classifications. This is good, because each partner gets
something back every day from the work he or she has invested.
At the end of the venture, when it is time to split up the nuggets and
jewelry gold, we pick out the most extraordinary nuggets and set them aside for
the moment. Then we make equal piles of all the remaining pieces of gold as
equal by weight as possible, and equal by size and apparent value of the nuggets
involved. Sometimes this can be a bit challenging, because each nugget is
different. But when everyone is satisfied that the piles are all as equal in
value that we are going to get them, we draw cards or tickets. Whoever has the
highest card or first ticket gets to choose the first pile. The second-highest
card gets to choose the second pile, and so on.
In our program, if one partner has some slightly-higher percentage of gold
coming to him, he will usually receive the proper amount out of fines and flakes
which were set aside for this purpose.
Then we take the most extraordinary nuggets that were set aside for last, and
bid them off one by one-just like in an auction. Everyone involved in the
partnership has an equal opportunity to bid up the amount of fine and
flake-sized gold they are willing to pay for each nugget. Each nugget goes to
whoever is willing to pay the most. The gold payments are directed into the
group jar. Once all the nuggets have been sold off this way, the final gold from
the jar is split up properly amongst all the partners according to our
agreement.
While there are plenty of other ways to do it, this system has worked out
very well, with no hard feelings amongst the partners, even though we often find
very high-grade gold deposits with a lot of nuggets.
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