The Bima Gold Dredge, October 11th, 2023
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bima_(dredge)
I cannot find any photos of the Bima gold dredge. But if you click the link above from Wikipedia, you can get the back story on the machine.
Back in the 1980s when I was living in my condo in Edmonds, WA on Puget Sound, I would often write to my friend Glen and he would write back (snail mail).
Glenn worked at Kenmore Air Harbor on the line crew while he was going to school to be an engineer.
Glenn got a job in Nome, Alaska working on the gold dredge Bima. The dredge worked the gold rich seafloor off of the Nome beach.
Glenn told me that the job was hell but paid well. A helicopter would take Glenn and the relief crew out to the Bima. It was 48 hours on and 48 hours off according to Wiki. That sounds about right. 48 hours on a noisy dredge in the Bering Sea in shallow water is no joy ride.
Glenn told me that he never took off his hearing protection the whole time he was on the dredge. His job was to look at the machinery gauges and if there was a problem, fix it.
The helicopter ride could be interesting in bad weather. The pilot had to be very good to land in the dark, wind, and rain on a moving helipad.
The Bima had anchors from all points on the barge it was on. Basically, the Bima was a dredge on a barge made for tin mining in Malaysia. Glenn told me that the tropics and lousy steel made it easy to bend with the human hand.
Glenn went back to the tail of the barge once. This is where the final spinning of the bottom material was done to sort out the gold.
It wasn’t very efficient. Glenn said a lot of gold went off over the stern. He sent me a small bottle of what was in the sifting soil. It did have a bit of glitter in it. Maybe 1/32 oz of gold. And that was going off the stern.
Glenn said Nome is no home. There are not trees. In the summer there is no night and in the winter there is no day.
His hotel room was in a trailer brought up from the lower 48 on a barge which was next to another trailer and another.
Glenn said sleep was difficult as the miners would hire local Indian prostitutes and bang away all night. The walls were thin.
After two seasons of this (they don’t dredge in the dead of winter when blizzards are common), Glenn didn’t go back and the Bima was soon after towed to Seattle and sold for scrap.
I ended up throwing the gold and bottom silt sample away when I moved to CA. What the hell. A little gold in the dump might get someone excited.
TJM
Timmy Tae's Thoughts 