Today I spent four hours on Gemstone Beach (Orepuki, Southland) in the company of Chrissy. We arrived at 10am and left just after 2pm. It was a cool but sunny day. It proved much more productive than the last couple of fossicks – I collected 120 stones, though 30 of them very small ones for use in the tumbler (see “Little Things – The Value of Small Stones”).
Two paragliders spent an hour or so hovering over the beach before gliding away in the direction of Monkey Island.
Eleven of today’s finds are featured below. The first two are small stones, different colours but with really interesting detail when viewed up close. They are both brecciated (fragmented then re-cemented), the second is maybe a quartzite:
A couple of green stones with interesting compositions, likely due to brecciation as well:
Two poppy jaspers with hematite, with different sized orbs. The first stone has a rounded oblong shape, the other is more spherical:
Among the larger stones was this banded argillite with a stress offset, sometimes called an “earthquake stone”, and a sedimentary stone that John Taylor suggests (in a comment in the Facebook Group “New Zealand Lapidary, Rocks, Minerals, Fossils”) is a “very swirly river deposit”:
A nice smooth quartzy pebble – I like the subdued colour:
It looks like this stone consists of tiny black fragments in a light-coloured matrix:
And the final stone is a hydrogrossular garnet with interesting patterns within it:
Part 9 is entitled “Nine Finds from the Back Beach, Riverton Aparima”. The first Post in this Series is here.
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