This morning I drove the 120 kilometres east to Slope Point, meeting with my good friend and fellow fossicker Oliver Simpson who lives there. When I arrived, it was four degrees and cloudy, but no wind or rain meant it wasn’t too uncomfortable on the beach. Access at Slope Point is always a challenge and Oliver’s four-wheel-drive was essential. It was three and a half hours before low tide, and the seas were high. They had recently broken across the beach we went to and a channel was emptying what was usually a lagoon as the tide receded.
The beach was unexpectedly bereft of stones, we initially thought, but careful fossicking revealed a line or two of scattered small pebbles.
Some good patches of pebbles could also be found around the fringe of the lagoon. It was there that Oliver found a recently uncovered large piece of petrified wood that he managed to lug back to the truck.
I ended up with a nice haul of much smaller stones, suited to tumble-polishing. After about two hours on the beach, we made our way back to Oliver’s place. The temperature had risen only two or three degrees. I gave him some stones I had polished for him, stones he had collected himself at Slope Point. He gave me a few more to polish which I readily welcomed as they are often gorgeous and colourful.
He also showed me a gorgeous petrified wood bowl, made from a Slope Point slab, that Michael Lidski had polished for him.
Most of the photos of the stones I collected today were taken back at Riverton Aparima in gloomy light – the photos were not sharp enough for good close-ups.
A shorter version of this Post first appeared in the Facebook Group “New Zealand Lapidary, Rocks, Minerals, Fossils”. The next Post features a visit to a Kakanui beach. The first Post in this Series is here. A Series Index is here.
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