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To: IngotWeTrust who wrote (53708)	6/5/2000 12:27:00 PM
From: Alex	Respond to of 116790

There's a flash for every pan: Gold seekers in Old Sac contest By Pamela Martineau Bee Staff Writer (Published June 5, 2000) Professional gold panners won't divulge exactly how they coax glistening flecks of gold to the bottom of a pan. But they'll talk in broad terms about swishing the pans. Or shaking them. "It's a secret," Cindy Pekarek, a California state gold panning champion, said of her technique. "But I swish and push and pull." "I shake and dip," said Lee Buhler. "I go slow and easy," said Ernie Laszlo. Gold panners of all techniques Sunday dunked pans of gravel into tubs of dirty brown water in the U.S. National Gold Panning Championships 2000 at the Discovery Museum in Old Sacramento. About 100 veteran panners hoping to compete in the world competition later this year swished, shook, pushed and pulled pans through the water, hoping to capture paper-thin flecks of gold in record time. Each participant was given a bucket of gravel that contained an amount of gold known only by the judges. The panners then had to seize all of the metal before their competitors. "You don't want to lose your gold, but you don't want to go so slow that everybody else beats you," said Don Robinson, co-founder of the Mother Lode Goldhound Association, a recreational gold panning group represented at the event. For some of the participants, panning was once more than a recreation. It was a livelihood. Celeice Stockman and her husband, Ron, also members of the Goldhound group, panned for a living about 20 years ago, taking their kids into the wilds outside Auburn for weeks on end, hunting the elusive metal. "Once, he found a pound at one time," Celeice Stockman said of her husband. "But you always want to find a bigger one," she added. Skip Anderson said he is purely a recreational gold hunter. "I started doing it in 1965 to get rich," said Anderson, "but I didn't quit my day job." Anderson said the hobby gives him exercise, fresh air and a chance to "meet a lot of good people." Members of the Goldhounds, like other panning groups represented at the event, travel together in trips that mix panning and camping. "At the end of the day we have a potluck and compare and see what we got," Buhler said of the rituals of the panning trips. But Sunday, the focus was on winning, with panners cheering their peers. "Nugget Chasers! Nugget Chasers!" screamed one man as a fellow panner furiously swished water over the side of his gold pan. Like many hard-core competitors, some gold panners eat, sleep, drink and breathe panning. Pekarek said her good dreams of panning are of going into a mine shaft and finding a big nugget. In her nightmares, she loses control of her pan and its contents. But for most panners, nirvana comes when the fleck sticks to the bottom. Pros know that's the time to wipe your index finger on your shirt, then use it to press down on the speckle and flick it -- ever so gently -- into a vial. "When you take it out, you are the first one ever to have seen that gold," Celeice Stockman said of panning in the wild. "You know no one else has touched it." sacbee.com