August 2025 Stone Collecting Trip – Part 19, A Surprisingly Productive Fossick at Seadown Beach, Kakanui, Monday 25 August

After leaving Papatotara, I stayed in Dunedin on Sunday night. Before departing there on Monday morning I visited Hard to Find Books and the Little Rock Shop. I noticed the Little Rock Shop still had some of the tumble-polished trace fossils I had sold to them in 2020 (see photo below) – I had produced the photo-book “The Trace Fossil Stones of Gemstone Beach” to accompany them. I also noticed for sale a small piece of rock labelled serpentine from Mossburn. It reminded me a lot of a stone that Chrissy had found on Gemstone Beach a few months ago. With the permission of the woman behind the counter, I took a couple of photos to send to Chrissy.

I eventually arrived at Kakanui after lunch. Before heading to my accommodation, I called in at Seadown Beach at 1.20pm. Low tide had been at 10.44am so the waves were slowly advancing up the beach. It was a sunny day, though cool. No-one else was on beach during the 90 minutes I was there, though a dog walker made his way along the old road (now closed) that runs parallel to the beach behind it.

There was a scattering of stones at edge of waves, and I first walked south to climb over some rocks to acess the first small bay – this often has a good patch of stones and there were some there though not as many as often there is. When I visited the beach on my way south, three and a half weeks ago, quite a bit of sand had been piled up here, but that was gone today. After searching through the stones, I climbed back over the rocks walked north, finding some small but good patches of stones. I went about 400 to 500 metres past the carpark area before turning around at 2.30pm, getting back to my car around 3pm. I found more interesting stones than I expected – it turned out to be the most productive of the three fossicks I had here on my way north. I next drove to the Kakanui River mouth to take photos of my finds as the sun was shining and my accommodation was not available until 4pm.

Twenty-two of my finds are featured below. There are always interesting quartzites on this beach. Following are ten I collected today. Maybe my favourite find today is the first one, a cloud quartzite containing different hues and some tiny black dots:

Of the other quartzites I picked up this one is the palest:

These two are the reddest:

This has a distinctly reddish tinge:

The red in this is more subtle and restrained:

This is the largest:

Yellow is a common quartzite colour here:

This is a dark yellow, one side having some very small clear quartz inclusions:

This last quartzite is an unusual kind of darkish yellow:

There are often interesting red jaspers on Seadown Beach. Some of them are brecciated, like this small one:

Some have green veins, like this one:

A larger jasper I decided to take home for the stone garden:

I also kept my eye out for the brown stones that often contain tiny bryozoan fossils (and probably other tiny fossils as well). I first picked one of these up in June 2022 and it took a while to identify them. These fossils are very difficult to see with the naked eye. I picked up a handful of stones that were potential specimens but I couldn’t really tell if they held the fossils until I analysed the photos. Two of the stones were relatively large. Here’s the first of them:

And the other large one:

One of the smaller stones I picked up also turned out to contain the fossils:

And here’s an example of a stone of similar colour, with some tiny markings in it, that turns out to be brecciated:

And this similarly brown stone looks like it might be a quartzite:

The other kind of stone I keep an eye out for on this beach is a type of fossiliferous limestone, what I initially referred to as fossilised sea-floor. These usually have small shells in them, among other things. Here are three I found today, the first one having probably a fossil rhodolith in its lower right area – it wasn’t until September 2024 that I identified the round/spherical objects as rhodoliths:

For more examples of fossiliferous limestone from this beach see “January 2022, Stone of the Day #13 – Kakanui Fossilised Sea Floor” and “Kakanui Fossilised Sea Floor Stones – Only 400 Grit Tumble”.

Finally, an interesting white stone that is brecciated at one end:

The next Post in this Series covers the second of my three fossicks at Seadown Beach as stop over in Kakanui on my drive north. An Index to the Series is here.