re: "5000 pans at 10gms per pan (his words)"...to be fair to...

re: "5000 pans at 10gms per pan (his words)"...to be fair to dean goodwin, he actually said "10g per tonne", which is his estimate of the grade of ore in the panning dish.

a lot of prospectors tip the panned residue, which includes all the heavy minerals including gold, into a tub...over a year or so this can amount to a useful quantity of gold.

for example 5000 pannings of half a kg each, if the grade was 10g would give you less than $1900 worth of gold... but most of those samples might be only a few grams, giving you less than $400 worth of gold.

the old time prospectors used to dolly and pan rich specimen ore for easy early cash...the modern equivalant is if you had a 30kg bag of drill cuttings that went 600g/t over one metre you could spend all day panning that to recover $1164 worth of gold, in theory, but the drill cutting is never pulverized fine enough to liberate all the gold.