Advanced Dredging Techniques Part 2 The Right Approach
About the author, Dave McCracken. By Marcie Foley After high school, in 1973, Dave joined the Navy, and graduated UDT/SEAL training class 77 in San Diego, California. He graduated as one of only seven men, from a beginning-class of 57 enrollees. Dave spent four years in the Navy, stationed in Coronado, San Diego with the UDT/SEAL teams. He made one tour to Vietnam/Westpac. At the end of his 4-year tour Dave moved to Los Angeles and started a commercial diving business, mostly performing underwater maintenance on yachts. Gold prices were going up dramatically during late 1979, and Dave began to consider that he might be able to use his diving ability and experience to recover gold from the bottom of California s rivers. He discovered (through a magazine) that people were already using suction dredges, so Dave made a trip to Keene Engineering (in Northridge, California) to discover an entire product-line of underwater mining equipment. In 1979, Dave launched his first expedition with two friends. They started in southern Oregon, and ended up in northern California 6 weeks later. After reading all of the available literature on underwater mining, they found the information was not much more than instructions on how to assemble the equipment. Dave and his partners had a very difficult time of it in the beginning, trying to figure out by themselves workable methods of locating gold deposits. It was several months of severe hardship before Dave and his partners located their first commercial-grade gold deposit (about $60 a day), which was enough to pay expenses and feed them. Dave s partners lost interest before the spring-thaw, and departed with the dredge, truck, and most of the other equipment they were using together. After his partners left, Dave found himself alone in the forest, living in a tent, with very few resources to get by on. Cold nights and an empty stomach found Dave struggling to learn all he could about how to find high-grade un