August 2025 Stone Collecting Trip – Part 22, Trying to Make a Better Mistake, Ward Beach, Thursday 28 August

I spent just over an hour at Ward Beach in Southern Marlborough this afternoon, arriving just before low tide. This is not the best time as most of the good-sized stones lie further up the beach, beyond the reach of the waves – this means they are dry and it is difficult to see their colours and details. I walked south to the mouth of the Flaxbourne River then back north to the first rocks at that end of the beach – this is a stretch of about 350 metres. It was warm but very windy. I collected just over 50 stones, 17 of which feature below.

I visit Ward Beach less often than the other beaches that feature on my South Island trips. So identifying its stones is more of a challenge. My usual sources for stone identification tend to be other fossickers, Facebook Groups like New Zealand Lapidary, Rocks, Minerals, Fossils” and Rock hounds New Zealand, a couple of books on New Zealand stones, and online resources (which are often not specific enough). I recently had an identification of a Gemstone Beach find challenged. I thought I had good evidence that it was ignimbrite but another credible suggestion made was metamorphosed banded rhyolite (both are rhyolite but formed through quite different processes). This currently remains unresolved in my mind. Sometimes stone identification can take some time, conflicting evidence can arise, and it can be a matter of “trying to make a better mistake” in order to arrive at greater accuracy and confidence. The phrase comes from a song I have listened to a lot recently, called “Call Me When You Land” by Luke Sital-Singh and Old Sea Brigade (see the end of this Post for a YouTube video). Another part of the lyrics that could be bent to relevance in the context of this paragraph is “Failure is a feature, We’re gonna figure it out”. I always live in hope of achieving better identifications.

Sometimes identification depends on the tiniest of details, and the details can be ambiguous. One of my finds today was a small jasper. Looking at a photo of it later, I suddenly realised it could be a poppy jasper, a form of that stone with small orbs. It looked fairly ordinary when I picked it up but lately I’ve been collecting a few jaspers from Ward Beach just to see what’s there. I took photos of my finds at my motel a couple of hours after the fossick, when the sun came out from behind clouds. But I didn’t look at the photos until more than three weeks later:

At the top right quadrant of the first side above, there appears to be some orb-like structures. This was very surprising to me as I have not found a poppy jasper at Ward Beach before and have not seen references to such finds there. I decided to see if I could get a better photo to confirm its identification as a poppy jasper. But it turned out to be nearly impossible to get a clear image without reflections marring it. After numerous attempts, this is the best I could do:

I think there are indeed orbs in the stone, though they are in only parts of it and are not as clear as in many other poppy jaspers. So maybe the identification of this stone is not as a poppy jasper but as a jasper containing some orbs in part of it.

Generally speaking, we are fortunate, when it comes to Ward Beach, that geologist Jocelyn Thornton has a section in her “Gemstones” on the beach stones to be found on the East Coast from Hawke Bay to North Canterbury (page 31 of the pdf). Marlborough falls within this area, and the stones she describes can all be found there. Limestone and flint dominate. Her section on chert and flint (page 19) also refers to stones from this area (#4 and #5):

Maybe the easiest to identify are what Thornton calls “grey limestone with bands of worm trails like rows of arrowheads” (#2 in page 31). These are relatively common on Ward Beach and can be visually very interesting. Here are three I found today:

Trace fossils that don’t have the “rows of arrowheads” can also be found. Three from my finds today:

The next most interesting stones are those where the original rock (limestone, flint and mudstone) has been broken up and “recemented with agate” (#6 in Thornton’s page 31) or which have veins of white chalcedony. I usually think of the main rock as limestone but it sometimes could be chert or flint, I don’t know the latter two very well so some mistakes in my identifications are distinctly possible:

A larger specimen that I left on the beach – its colour and thin veins are visually attractive:

It’s hard to identify the matrix in this brecciated stone, though perhaps chalcedony is in there:

Not sure what kind of stone this one is:

This next find is an igneous stone of some sort, maybe with feldspar crystals, with the green being not that common in my experience:

The only igneous stone included in Thornton’s section on the East Coast region is a gabbro, which is quite a different colour.

“Call Me When You Land”
by Old Sea Brigade & Luke Sital-Singh (2020)

What am I waking for?
Am I waiting for a sign
That I’m brave enough to follow?
Can I just fail enough to bail out?
I’m in my Wednesday suit
I’m just so sick of this commute
Are they always speaking to me?
Only advertisers know me
Maybe I’m just falling away
Counting down the days
Trying to make a better mistake

Call you when I land
Don’t think about the distance
Do you understand
Not everything is missing
We’re gonna figure it out
Call me when you can
Don’t think about the future
Maybe lend a hand
‘Cause failure is a feature
We’re gonna figure it out

I’m in Belvedere
You said the air was crystal clear
I get attached to my surroundings
Like they know everything about me
Maybe I’m just falling away
Counting down the days
Trying to make a better mistake
Maybe I’m just falling apart
How’d we get so far?
Trying to make a better escape

Call you when I land
Don’t think about the distance
Do you understand
Not everything is missing
We’re gonna figure it out
Call me when you can
Don’t think about the future
Maybe lend a hand
‘Cause failure is a feature
We’re gonna figure it out

Call you when I land
Don’t think about the distance
Do you understand
Not everything is missing
We’re gonna figure it out
Call me when you can
Don’t think about the future
Maybe lend a hand
‘Cause failure is a feature
We’re gonna figure it out

This is the final Post in this Series. An Index to the Series is here.