March 2025 Stone Collecting Trip – Part 4, Two Visits to Kakanui’s Seadown Beach, Saturday 1 March

Today I made two visits to Seadown Beach, Kakanui, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The morning visit started in heavy fog and I spent 90 minutes there at low tide. There were a handful of other people on the beach, looking for shells or kai moana (shellfish) or just taking in the scenery. Some of the stones were wet from the fog so I had a greater choice than yesterday.

I ended up collecting 54 stones this morning. I was pleased with what I found, especially the six stones featured below. The first is full of bryozoan fossils (and maybe other tiny fossils as well) – it was the last stone I found, heading back to the car across the dry beach.

See this Post for information about bryozoan fossil stones.

Sometimes small beach agates can be found here, like the next stone. I had walked north up the beach for about 400 metres, and this was my northernmost find. It was the only agate I found today. And the beach often provides very nice jaspers – the one below has an interesting green vein.

I found a limestone pebble with lots of tiny interesting bits in it, and a yellow quartzite with some red in it:

As explained in this Post, the limestone is soft and needs to be treated gently when tumble polished. And the range of hues in Kakanui’s yellow quartzites are presented in this Post.

This morning’s sixth feature find is a type of stone that can be found along the North Otago coast. It is likely to be basalt with feldspar crystals. But the crystals here are the largest I have seen in such a stone.

You can see red, brown and green marks and lines inside the crystals, which initially made me doubt their identification as crystals – maybe they are fragments of rock and the stone is a breccia. However, I later found a stone on Gemstone Beach with recognisable feldspar crystals and they too had such marks/lines.

This morning I also spotted a couple of herons not far away up the beach from me. I managed to snap a few photos. They are probably white-faced herons, the most common type in New Zealand.

The fog was well gone by late morning. In mid-afternoon, I spent 50 minutes at Seadown Beach, just before high tide, and came away with 36 stones.

Seven of this afternoon’s finds are featured below. The first four are variations on the yellow and red quartzites commonly found here:

I liked this dark coloured stone and the photos reveal that it too is a quartzite:

Another limestone-related pebble, this one with shells apparent in it:

Finally, I was interested in the subtle veins in this dark stone:

The next day I drove to Riverton, my base for the next month.

Next stop, Gemstone Beach. See this Post for my first fossick there. The first Post in this Series is here.