My August 2025 trip actually begins at the end of July. I left home in Whanganui yesterday, 28 July, to catch a Bluebridge Cook Strait ferry in Wellington. On this trip, I will be visiting my favourite South Island beaches again, as well as consulting with Chrissy about the book we are preparing on the stones of Gemstone Beach. Chrissy lives just to the east of Gemstone Beach and writes the Tumble and Polish Blog. After reaching Picton in the South Island just before sunset yesterday, I drove for an hour to Ward in Marlborough, checking into Ian and Ronnie’s Flaxbourne Motels for the night – they now know me well from my regular visits. This morning, I stopped at Ward Beach before continuing on to Woodend near Christchurch. A storm is currently approaching New Zealand from the northwest, bringing high winds and heavy rain. There were some stong gusts of wind at Ward Beach, along with a little scattered rain, but it looks like I will be keeping ahead of the storm as I drive south.
On the way to Ward Beach, I passed a major construction site in a paddock, what appeared to be frames being put up for a large solar energy farm. It turns out that Marlborough Lines are locating 18,000 solar panels 0n two sites right next to Ward – see “South Marlborough solar farm to generate 3% of region’s power”. The last couple of kilometres of the road to the beach are gravel and halfway along it a recent water flow had gouged out a small but deepish channel – I had to drive carefully across the least deep part. At this time of year, in mid-winter, there were only two campervans in the camping area behind the carpark. No-one else was on the beach for the 90 minutes while I was there.
In front of the carpark, down near the waves, a lot of stones could be found today, along more than 100 metres of the beach. This is much more than during my previous visits over the last few years. I walked back and forth across that area. Then I went behind the beach to the Flaxbourne River, walking downstream. From that viewpoint, a bank of stones up to about eight metres high can be seen (see photo below, third row), indicating the significant depth of stones on the beach. More about this area, the “abandoned estuary” of the Flaxbourne River, a result of the 2016 earthquake, can be found on Geotrips.
During my 90 minutes at Ward Beach, I collected about 40 stones. Following are nine of them. The first three, of three different rock material, had interesting white veins:
I found some trace fossil stones – here’s one such stone with a “wrinkled” composition, and it’s my guess that the second one also has a kind of trace fossil in it:
A nice small jasper with some quartz in it – or is it a quartz stone with a lot of iron oxide in it?
In this find, the white quartz dominates the red iron oxide:
The blue in this stone caught my eye – it could be limestone:
Finally, what could be a breccia (a stone made up of rock fragments in a matrix) or maybe a stone containing pieces of shell (or fossilised shell):
Next beach visit, as I continued south, was at Kakanui, near Oamaru in North Otago – see Part 2. An Index to the Series is here.
