Powelltown 2014

I managed to sneak back to Powelltown with a couple of friends from the Essendon Lapidary Club. Powelltown is a great fossicking location, and i have posted about it before. This time was no different. A great day was had with some great cutters found.

The photos are from two trips during Jan and Feb

Powelltown Fossicking with ALF

I though i would post a few photos up of a recent fossicking trip i attended. With the support of many members from the Warragul Lapidary club, and the Australian Lapidary forum, a trip was organised to Powelltown in Victoria’s south east.

Powelltown is a great location that we have been to before and is a location that Topaz, Tourmaline and Quartz (Smokey) can be easily found. The actual fossicking is easy, once you access the creek, and consists of digging and sieving the sandy bottom of the creek. This time around we managed to find a couple of Smokey quartz points, a nice 300 carat clear quartz cutter, many black tourmaline specimens and one sliver of topaz that would be to small to cut.

Fossicking in Powelltown

We managed to get away with the Goulburn Valley Gem Club on a fossicking trip this week end. The trip was well supported with about 10 car loads of people heading up into the hills north east of Powelltown, Victoria.

Powelltown Hall Carpark

Carpark / Clearing near our fossicking location

Bianca, Our Mining Supervisor for the day

The location, once an old Tin mine, was said to have many varieties of Quartz (clear, Smokey and Citrine) as well as Topaz and Tourmaline.

In our car, our being Bianca and Myself, we had Chris and John. As a team we also ended up working the same hole for the day with Margaret joining us after lunch. Working the one hole meant we were able to work over much more material in our sieves and plenty of stone was carries back up to the cars for investigation, not all of it keepers though.

Some of the dense bush we needed to get through to find the creek

Apparently its time for lunch

Some of our haul

Yep, another Leech

In the end we managed to find plenty of quartz, of various colors and quality and some good samples of black Tourmaline. I don't believe we were lucky enough to uncover any Topaz, which i a shame. Still, that just means there is some there for us to find next time. Leeches were the only issue for the day, many of them finding their way over to me for a feed.

Smoky Quartz Points

A Large Smoky Crystal i grabbed for the garden

All in all it was a great day out. Thank you to the Goulburn Valley Gem club and Margaret from the Essendon Lapidary club for a great day out. I am looking forward to the next trip to Stratford.

Updates and Port Fairy planning

Its been a long time between posts but as its winter we have not been taking the van out, rather we have been doing some great day trips out of Melbourne, on the days where the weather is mild.

With Spring here and Summer on its way we have a few outings planned to get us warmed up for the Christmas Trip.

Updates
Firstly, i have made some updates to the Fuel economy page for the Colorado, and i have updated the Colorado page with updated information on the Warranty issues we have been having, and some photos of the recent upgrades.

Trips

We have a few longer day trips planned, mostly with the Essendon Gem & Lapidary Club. The first, in late October, will be to Powelltown, were we expect to be able to fossick for Quartz and Topaz. As Powelltown is close to Melbourne we will be treating this as a day trip.

The second Fossicking trip we have planned for the last part of the year is to Stratford, which although further afield, we will also still treat as a day trip. It will be a LONG day though so we are keeping our options open :) I am not to sure what we expect to find here but there is a 4WD day planned into the hills so it should be a lot of fun.

Lastly we have booked a weekend away for Melbourne Cup weekend. For the 4 days of the long weekend we are booked into the Belfast Cove Holiday Park in Port Fairy. The park receives very good ratings on the Badgers review site and we are looking forward to getting away in the van.