I arrived at a crowded Gemstone Beach carpark just after noon, about an hour after high tide. It was a warm day, being around 19 to 20 degrees right up until I left at 4 pm. The big surprise walking down to the beach was to see that all the seaweed piled up there yesterday was now completely gone!
I walked my usual fossick trail, down to the Waimeamea River lagoon. I found three or four nice little jaspers along the lagoon’s edge, and a few more elsewhere on the beach. This was one of them:
Four other small red jaspers I found this afternoon:
Among the green stones I found was this breccia with dark markings in the matrix:
Six other green (probably epidote) stones, including two trace fossil ones:
Finally, five more finds:
In general, I came across very few hydrogrossular garnets this afternoon but quite a few trace fossil stones.
On my way back to the carpark, I stopped and chatted to the local gold miner who daily visits in his ATV. He often pulls a trailer behind, with a small sluice box to run water over sand to collect fine gold. His claim covers a number of kilometres of the Te Waewae Bay coast. He said that when gold mining was initially carried out here, in the late 19th century, each claim consisted of only a 12 foot (3.5 metres) wide piece of the beach – much richer ground than today! See here for a 1993 “New Zealand Geographic” article on gold mining in the Orepuki area that mentions the fine gold that can be found on the local beaches.
And it’s farewell to Gemstone Beach from me for this fossicking trip.
The next Part of this Series reports on a fossick at Kakanui as I travel north, back to Whanganui – it includes a significant section about the stones with bryozoan fossils that I find there. The Series Index is here.
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