Nicola Gray and Angie Nicholas are from Hawkes Bay, a region hard hit by Cyclone Gabrielle in mid-February. They are both keen fossickers, active in the Facebook Group “New Zealand Lapidary, Rocks, Minerals, Fossils”, and readers of TumbleStone Blog. Nicola has a Facebook Page, My Rock Tumbling Journey, and a series of YouTube videos – her posts and videos document many of the details of fossicking and tumble-polishing, as well as stone cutting. Long interested in visiting Gemstone Beach, they were all ready to do so when the Cyclone intervened. Angie got stranded when a local bridge was swept away, and many regional roads were badly damaged. They revised their plans and bookings and finally managed to drive south in late March, completed a successful ferry crossing of Cook Strait on 31 March, stopped off at Birdlings Flat for a fossick, and arrived in Southland yesterday. I spent a number of hours on Gemstone Beach/Te Waewae Bay today in their company.
We took a slow meander along the beach, picking up stones, discussing stones – my usual solitary fossicking tends to be a little less meandering and much less interesting. Here are seven of the stones that Nicola and Angie collected, photographed on the beach.
Angie found a few small poppy hematite jaspers – this is perhaps the best of them, a gorgeous stone. The “orbs” are a little smaller than those in a stone I found a few days previously (see the last stone featured in Post 31 – also see Post 33 for three other small poppy jaspers).
The next of their finds is probably a colourful brecciated quartzite. It’s been bashed around in the waves but will likely cut well:
The third stone is an unusual one, I’ve not seen the likes of it before. It might be a brecciated jasper, and there’s some quartz in there as well:
Another brecciated stone, this one with green epidote in it, plus a quartz with coloured mineral staining, including epidote again:
The final two are a small volcanic stone, possibly amygdaloidal, and a brecciated quartz:
The next Post features my own finds from today. The first Post in the “Southern Sojourn” Series is here. The Index to the Series is here.
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