Today we became gemstone miners, and found a range of different coloured sapphires!

OK, those aren’t ours…. ours are tiny, and amounted to 18.35 ct of rough gems in total, but it was a good fun experience and the boys loved it. We’re camping at Sapphire, and mined at Rubyvale which is just a few km’s away.

We began at Bobby Dazzler, where we took the ‘do your own’ mining option. So rather than buying a bucket of ‘wash’ and just searching it for gems, we dug up and loaded six buckets of ‘wash’ from the creek bed.

Loading the buckets.

Then it was up to the processing area to sieve out the dirt. Remaining dirt is washed out with water in the Willoughby, which also sorts the heavier stones to the bottom. Finally, the sieve is upended and the painstaking process of searching through the wash begins. It took us about 4 hours to go through the 6 buckets!

loading the sieve

Sieving

initial rinse

The willoughby

Painstaking sorting

The results

on a mirror

After a late lunch we then headed out to another similar operation, ‘Miners Heritage’ and did a tour of an underground sapphire mine (not operational anymore).

down into the depths…. about 15-20m actually

Thin layer of wash that contains gemstones (about 15cm thick here)

Example of earlier tunnel prior to power tools. Still not allowed to use mechanical mining equipment around here!!! That means anything big enough to sit on is off limits.

entry shaft

Finally we visited some of the gem and jewelery shops in the region. Looked for a nice ring for Nicole (with blue sapphire of medium darkness I reckon!) but didn’t purchase anything.

Most places around here are very dodgy looking – temporary shacks abound, with dodgy looking basic mines and mining equipment in every back (or front!) yard. It’s function of the nature of gem fossicking I guess, and the short term mining lease system (30x30m plot for 5 years)- these places wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the gems!

Now that we’ve got a miners license (which lasts for a month), they boys are dead keen to go out mining again tomorrow….. We do have a shovel and bucket, but sieve and water could be a little issue to resolve. I do have some flyscreen which was intended for the rear emergency window….we’ll see!

Edit: for anyone just wanting to look for sapphires in a bucket of wash, I’d recommend going to Miners Cottage at Rubyvale. See subsequent post What a Gem! For anyone wanting to learn the ropes, an all day self drive tour would be a good option.