August 2025 Stone Collecting Trip – Part 9, Five Green-Hued Finds from Gemstone Beach, Tuesday 12 August

I spent three hours on Gemstone Beach this morning. I arrived at 9.30am when it was five degrees. It was partly cloudy, later becoming sunny, and only a light breeze. There were no cars in the carpark when I arrived, though a woman with three dogs soon pulled up. When I finished, no-one was on the beach and mine was the only car in the carpark. I managed to fossick to a point maybe 400 metres past the Waimeamea River Lagoon, further than I have managed before this month.

The fossick was a productive one. As is often the case, I collected quite a few green-hued stones, five of which are the first finds featured below. I also found about 25 hydrogrossular garnets and a nice poppy jasper, but not many trace fossil stones.

The first of the five different interesting green stones I found today is a strong green and with angular patches of material with tiny white spots – a breccia? or a spotted stone flooded by a strong green mineral like epidote?

The second green stone is much lighter in colour though with green circular features:

It was the wavy light band that caiught my eye in the third green stone:

I’m still trying to figure out what is going on in this fourth green stone. It’s probably argillite, but it looks like there’s fragments of another green argillite stone in it, and those fragments might have some tiny trace fossils in them:

The final green stone is, in fact, an argillite one with trace fossils in it, the best of the very few I saw today:

Here are two of the hydrogrossular garnets I collected, a transparent one and a gorgeous opaque brown one:

I suspect the following stone also has some hydrogrossular garnet in it, though it has a very unusual black and white pattern:

Today’s poppy jasper find – it has small dark red patches not always present in such stones. It’s a spherical stone so can be viewed from a number of perspectives:

The next stone is a type that I find from time to time on Gemstone Beach. It is volcanic in origin and is amygdaloidal – a stone with many tiny gas holes that have been infilled with minerals. When I saw it on the beach, I knew it would be interesting – photos of similar finds include Stone #30 in this Post and the eighth stone in this Post.

I also occasionally come across the following type of stone. I like its colour and the fine veins in it, and there are some interesting tiny inclusions as well:

Today’s final featured find is, I think, a jasper, with light and dark coloured areas. These don’t always tumble polish well but I really like the colours:

The next Post in this Series covers a fossick at McCracken’s Rest on Te Waewae Bay, eight kilometres west of Gemstone Beach. An Index to the Series is here.