A gold prospector who was prowling Victoria’s fields in Ballarat, Australia hit paydirt on Wednesday when his metal detector found something big buried two feet down.
When the man–who asked not to be identified–dug up his prize, he was astonished to find himself the lucky owner of a 12-pound gold nugget, which is worth around $315,000. Cordell Kent, the owner of The Mining Exchange Gold Shop in Ballarat, said it’s the most significant find he’s ever seen in his 20 years in the business.
“A lot of people think Victoria’s goldfields are dead and that there’s none left, but he (the prospector) has worked in an area where a lot of people have worked in the past but he persisted and he’s been rewarded. We are 162 years into the gold rush and it’s never totally waned, it’s just changed,” he said.
The lucky prospector produced the find with an expensive piece of equipment–a $6,000 Minelab GPX 5000 metal detector–so don’t think you can hop a plane to Australia and start digging. However, he says he’s relatively new to the business–calling it a hobby–so apparently a fair amount of luck is involved with the skill.