Inverell

I thought I’d come back to “7 Oaks” just outside Inverell for a few days to get some more sapphires, but in the end I decided to stay for 10 days. Hey I was getting stones, and who knew if I was ever going to make it back here to get any more. The weather was freezing cold, it rained to the point of almost flooding, it was muddy and dirty and the work was hard and physical. There are no luxuries here, although, now I had the heater installed in the van perhaps there was one luxury. Still I was doing it easier than some, Alan comes here every year chasing sapphires and he was living in a tent for 4 weeks.

He complained that it was getting a bit cold at night as there was ice forming on the inside of his tent.

Here are the tools I used and my little work area for the ten days I was here, nothing fancy but very functional.

Yes, my gloves are frozen solid in the picture above and so is the surface of the water in the plastic washing tub. I had to slip on the frozen gloves and try to get them working, then crack the ice in the tub in preparation for washing the sieves full of dirt.

I got to know this pile of dirt intimately, this is where you fill your buckets ready for sieving and on an average day I’d wash between 50 and 60 buckets so there was 25-30 trips to this pile every day to fill my two buckets. After filling the buckets you walk back to the work station, stack the two sieves together with the course one on top and fine underneath. Fill the top sieve with dirt then dunk in the water and do the magic sieving dance, often while cursing your sore back while bent over the tub. Empty the top sieve after checking carefully for any large sapphires, then centre the dirt in the bottom sieve by giving it the right jiggle acttion in the water.

Then flip the dirt out of the sieve onto the hessian covered barrel and if you have done your centring  and flipping correctly all the heavier stones like sapphire and zircons will be in the centre, and once it’s flipped over they are sitting on the top of the rock. Can you see the small blue sapphire near the centre of the picture? So you pick it up with tweezers and add it to your container, then repeat the process over and over till your back can’t take it any more or you run out of light.

Red/brown zircon, blue sapphire and white/clear zircon are the staple find here along with some green, yellow and parti saphire which is a multicoloured sapphire. How much did I end up getting after a total of 14 days including the two trips?

As usual, I photographed them in one of my standard little plastic containers, above is the small stuff and now the bigger bits.

The big stones in the same container, they don’t look like much, and there will probably be a fair percentage of rejects but with many of the stones you don’t know until a professional looks at them and/or cuts into them. Using a good torch you can see some of them have beautiful colours and should cut into some lovely stones.

While I was there it rained very heavily one night and the following morning was a bit depressing for Alan.

He was really fossicking, he spent all his time down in the creek bed and banks of the creek digging and sieving, unlike myself who only worked from the dirt at the pile back in camp. So after the rain, the tiny creek turned into a big raging river, you can still see his red gloves on a rock but a lot of his gear was washed away and shortly after this photo the still rising river washed away his gloves.

I reversed my car up ready to hook the van on just in case the rain kept coming. It was a bit unnerving with a raging torrent just outside the van when the day before the creek was trickling, perhaps a foot or two wide in many parts.

 

Always look at the ground when you walk around the bush, car parks and tracks in the area. Saphires are everywhere and especially after rain you can often spot them while wandering, can you see the sapphire I found here on the ground while taking lichen photos?

On my last day I found 5 sapphires while walking around the site, but I had to move on, I was headed to Tingha, a small town about 30km away well known for it’s fossicking of various crystals including quartz and smokey quartz. I was cheating a bit here to begin with, my first fossicking trip was to Tingha sand mine, you pay $10 and you’re allowed to fossick on their rubbish heaps. They mine the sand and take out all rocks but the area is rich in quartz and this gets spat out with other rocks.

UPDATE. Please note Tingha sands no longer allows fossicking…

I ended up with two containers like this filled with some fine specimens, in fact I had to go back over my selected stones a couple of times to try and throw out more, I can’t carry too much of this large stuff.

Some of the quarts is perfectly clear, some of it smokey brown quartz, and less frequently, you find grass stone like the picture above. Tomorrow I’m off to a fossicking spot with Shaun, the manager of the caravan park here, for now I’ll post this up online though in future I may edit it to add more, or if I stay longer here I may even split this post and add a whole new one on Tingha, just depends on what I find. I’m also considering going back to Tingha sands next week for another fossick, not that I need more quartz, but if I can go back and get another nice haul it will allow me to improve the quality of the rocks I’m keeping. And hey, at $10 for a whole day it’s a bargain.

UPDATE. Please note Tingha sands no longer allows fossicking…