Hand of Faith

Photographs or videos never do justice to any situation. It’s like trying to describe a great live performance and expecting the person to understand what you were experiencing during that mind-blowing guitar solo or piano solo that set the keys on fire! The photo above does not actually tell you anything other than there is a large piece of gold in a case. The graining, the bumps that become smooth as glass and sheer size of the piece is all lost. Seeing this Golden Nugget up close and personal will change your perspective. It may change for a moment or for the rest of your of life, either way it will make an impact.

I’m sitting on the balcony, where my wife and I have been for the past two days, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico. It is a beautiful morning, the sun is just rising with it’s reddish/orange glow, a nice breeze coming off the water and I am dreaming of gold. I feel confident there have been many articles and stories written about Hand of Faith, and if you have ever seen this glorious nugget you would understand why. If you have any appreciation of gold or an understanding of just how rare and precious this naturally occurring metal is, then you would also understand why I am writing about it.

As you can see it is larger than a human head in both height and width. It’s thickness, at the “thumb”, is approximately 3-4 inches, or about as thick as your middle finger is long. When I heard that it was coming to town, I told my wife we had to go see it. The largest publicly displayed gold nugget in the world. It weighs in at a hefty 61 pounds 11 ounces!! Or said another way 876 ounces of American Gold Eagles.

At the close of business on Friday July 11 (when the photos were taken) gold closed at $1,339 per ounce. Just in raw, market manipulated “pricing” this chunk of gold is worth $1,321,593. When it was purchased in 1980 from the person that found it, in their backyard, gold peaked at $850 an ounce before plummeting and ultimately reaching it’s all time low of $251 in 1999. The nugget was purchased for $1 million in 1980. My guess is it would take several million to purchase it today.

According to GoldRushNuggets :

This nugget is just one of many impressive discoveries made in a well known gold producing region of Australia known as the Golden Triangle. The “triangle” is simply an imaginary line connecting 3 towns in Victoria, Australia. This region not only produced the Hand of Faith, but also some even larger nuggets including the Welcome Stranger nugget, which is the largest known gold nugget ever known to exist in history. It weighed a whopping 2,316 troy ounces and was found in 1869, but sadly it was melted down and no longer exists.

Black Cat Mining states there were two other nuggets, both much larger, that were found in the same area in Australia. One, Welcome Nugget, discovered in 1858 weighed in at 2,200 troy ounces and the largest nugget ever found was the Welcome Stranger dug up in 1869 and weighed in at 2,316 troy ounces!! Very profitable area of Australia. Now we know why the Chinese are so interested in the mining operations in Australia.

This piece of metal, or rock if you prefer, was purchased by the casino Golden Nugget in Las Vegas. Golden Nugget recently purchased a property in Biloxi, MS which is where my wife and I had an opportunity to see it and bring these photos and story back to you. For most people it’s just a “cool looking rock” that sits on display in the lobby of a nice hotel/casino. But for the few of us that actually get-it, it is awe inspiring.

To put Hand of Faith in perspective the nugget below weighs in at 24.26 grams. As you can see it is not as a big a the middle finger.

Remember, most gold nuggets are about the size of a dime or smaller, while Hand of Faith is somewhere around 20 inches tall, 9 inches wide and, overall, 1 inch thick. Photos and words will never be able to deliver what happens when you see this gigantic chunk of money! Can you imagine walking around your backyard with a metal detector and pulling this behemoth out of the ground! The person that found it wishes to remain anonymous, and I can’t say that I blame them. It would be like winning the lottery, why would you want anyone to know?

The nugget below weighs in at 5.62 grams–fairly typical gold nugget–and is about the size of your thumb nail.

That’s it, if you get a chance, get down to the Gulf Coast before September and see this truly inspiring piece of gold. It will set your mind a blaze and make you want to purchase a metal detector!