My Christmas gift to family this year consists of a TumbleStone 2023 Calendar plus some polished stones. The calendar itself features stones from Slope Point and Kakanui – see here for information on the calendar and on the two beaches. The stones I am sending come from the same beaches – Part One features the Slope Point stones while this Post features the ones from Kakanui’s Seadown Beach. It’s not always easy to part with stones I have collected and polished, but as long as I have a few good photos of them, I find it’s possible for me to give some of them away. The photos in these two Posts include “close-up” zooms that are sometimes brightened to bring out aspects of the details. The original photos were taken in bright sunshine, and viewing the stones themselves in bright sunshine best brings out their colours and patterns.
Kakanui’s Seadown Beach lies about 12 kilometres south of Oamaru and 20 kilometres north of the Moeraki boulders (see half way through this Post for a visit to the boulders). See here for an introduction to Seadown Beach, which starts just two kilometres north of Kakanui village. The beach is on a five kilometre stretch of coast running north to Cape Wanbrow. I mainly fossick along the initial 900 metres of Seadown Beach. I am attracted mainly by the quartzites (especially the yellow and red ones) and the jaspers (including brecciated and hematite varieties), as well as “fossilised sea floor” stones, soft waxy stones containing tiny fossils. Occasionally agates and petrified wood can be found here too, but these don’t feature in these Christmas gifts.
The following are the 22 Slope Point stones given away by me this Christmas. The first four are fossilised sea floor stones (see this Post for more information on this type of stone):
Nine jaspers are included, most of them brecciated, having been broken into fragments then re-formed, often in a matric of white quartz or dark hematite. Jasper is a cryptocrystalline form of quartz, with added minerals providing colour (see this Post for more details on jasper).
Finally, a number of quartzites were presented as gifts. The origins of quartzite are mentioned in the Wednesday 26 May 2021 entry in this Post. This kind of stone can be found on a number of beaches (like Birdlings Flat and Timaru) but seem to be more a little more common on Seadown Beach, with the yellow variety especially present. Many of them have tiny clear quartz crystals or fragments in them. The last two of the following nine stones may or may not be quartzite.
Merry Christmas!
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