Thurs, 2nd May, 2019 Bush camp at Wild Cat Mine, north-east of Leonora to Bush camp near Mertondale Mine, north-east of Leonora, WA

7am 8 degrees – definitely need the heater on. Got up at 8am when the temperature got up to 13 degrees. Clear sky and cold gusty wind.

Ray had noticed on the Happy Prospector app that there were new pending leases south of us near Mertondale Mine. We were going to go back to Leonora tomorrow but decided to pack up and go down to the leases and see what we can find. They are with KIN Mining who have been slowly picking up all the leases from there back down to east of Leonora. We had noticed there were a lot of forfeited lease notifications hanging up at the Mines Dept. These are leases where the owners haven’t made their payments or haven’t done the work on them as required.

Packed up and drove back out to Nambi Road then down to Mertondale – we had stopped here to read the history information before. I hope that sign is wrong.

We turned onto a road heading east then across a grid and parked on the roadside. There were pending leases to the north and south of us and we can get to them via the fenceline track. We had a cuppa and heard a vehicle cross the track – it was Mark and Heidi but they didn’t see us as Ray’s van was blocking ours from their view. We unhooked our van and the boys went off in our truck to find a suitable place to camp. Carol and I passed the time chatting.

The boys came back saying they had found the ‘caravan park’. Obviously everyone else has been out already as they went pending in mid April.

We chose to go north along the fence and turned into a well-used track where we spotted a van and where lots of others had camped recently. The van’s mate followed us in. We set up camp further along.

No wind so the sun is quite warm even though the thermometer says it is only 20 degrees. The phone reception was coming and going but I managed to get texts sent and received from Margaret & Bob and Kerry & Brian. Margaret and Bob will head up to us about the 7^th or 8^th and she offered to pick me up some fresh vegies and fruit and of course my wine order!! Kerry and Brian were at Sons of Gwalia so they will come up tomorrow afternoon.

After lunch we went for a wander with our detectors – plenty of recent holes around the area and hardly any rubbish so we figure they were onto gold.

After a cuppa, no one found any gold, I did my blog update – will have plenty to upload when we get back to Leonora and better phone reception. I exchanged TV series with Ray – we have a lot of different ones which is good. Will take a while to swap them all over but we have plenty of time to do it over the next few months.

Drinks by the fire – very pleasant as there was no wind. Only 16 degrees in the van though.

By 8pm it was down to 13 so we put the heater on – much nicer to just get that cold nip out of the air. Wasn’t so long ago we had the air conditioner on trying to cool us down from 45 degrees – what a change.