Emerald - Rubyvale

Today was our first day of correspondence school work for Jack. Chris took Lexie and Logan with him to the Information Centre to see what was in and around Emerald to do and see while Jack and I got stuck into the school work. I was a bit nervous about the school work, but it was all pretty clear and straight forward in the material received.

Chris arrived back from the information centre full of excitement and information. The most popular thing to do around Emerald was fossicking - and Chris was keen! There are lots of different tours that you can do, but we decided to head out to Rubyvale to have a look around and learn a little bit about sapphires before we went on a sapphire fossicking tour. As we drove into town we saw a mine called "Bobby Dazzler" and decided it look good to visit.

We went in and started talking to the owner about sapphires etc, when a woman entered from the back of the shop and asked "who's the plumber?" It seemed an odd question, when you have Chris and I standing the other side of the counter - but anyway Chris answered and said "I am". She asked if he wanted some work - she had plumbing work at her place she needed doing - but couldn't manage to get the local plumber to come around to do it. They discussed the work for a bit and organised to go around and check it out after we went through the sapphire mine.

We went down to the mine and everyone had to put on hardhats - which the kids thought was very exciting. The guide was a character - when we walked down into the mine he stopped us to tell us the rules. There only 2 rules in the mine - 1. don't scratch or dig at the walls 2. no farting! Well that cracked the kids up. The tour of the mine was great - it made it very clear were to find the sapphires - showed us what the vein looked like. We thought "this is going to be easy now we know what we are looking for".

After the tour we went up and bought a "bucket" of rocks and started fossicking for sapphires. When you look at them in jewellery or on their own they look like they would be easy to spot, but when you get them mixed amongst other rocks, wet and muddy - they are hard to spot. The kids had a ball - although a lot of what they found were only black rocks - we did find a couple of good sapphires. The kids quickly learnt that the best way to tell was to hold them up to the light to see any colour - although Lexie would hold the rocks to her eye (just about toughing her eye) and try to see the colours.

While we were talking to the owner of "Bobby Dazzlers" he told us about a public fossicking area not too far away - so after leaving there Chris was super keen to go and check it out. We drive only a couple of km's down the road and hit the dirt road that starts the public fossicking area. Chris never seems to worry about doing things like this - but I am for the forever worrier - "are we going the right way?", "should we be in here", "it's starting to rain - maybe we should go home". He told me to stop worrying and kept going, we eventually came across some shanties and white posts that show a claim. We were warned never to dig in someone else's claim - look for the four white posts which show their claim. I started worrying even more when we say this sign.

After leaving the mine - we went around to check out the plumbing job and when we got there she said she had rung a friend and told her "I have a plumber to do my work - you want him too?" - so he had his second job for the next couple of days.

Click here to view photos - http://picasaweb.google.com/travellingoakeys/EmeraldFossicking?feat=directlink