Yes, I am still in the land of the living - how time flies when your having fun or should I say when your not finding opal which has been the case so far this season. It is July already and this is the first couple of wet days since getting back to work. I haven't done a thing on the website as I have been reminded lately by a few people so that has to change too - opal or no opal!
On the family front there has been one major change - Mitchell is now a Cunnamulla resident. He and Zara have split up after 6 years of living together and he made the decision to move away from Toowoomba and with our urging decided to move out here. He is working in town 3-4 days a week and then coming out to help me for the rest of the week which is great - he is very keen to learn and I will be getting him mining here at the Shallows shortly. He is amazed with his health with the change as he has only had to inject himself once with insulin since arriving out a month ago - in Toowoomba it was every day - incredible what good diet and exercise can do for diabetes and, most importantly, getting away from a stressful situation. I hope he makes a long term commitment here as Lyn and I are enjoying having him around - one thing hasn't changed though - he is still bloody hard to get out of bed most mornings! Otherwise not much has changed - the gang in Canberra are all well and Noah is growing like mad and won't be long before he is up and away. Lyn has settled back into work in town and is flat out juggling her days between the two places she does the books for plus there are a couple of other smaller ones she does in her spare time - I do get to see her now and then!
On the mining front - Graham and I started in a new area on Gernot's lease, an area that there hasn't been too much done and we have found out why - the top 10ft or so is like concrete but we are getting through it. We have moved lots of dirt and there has been some terrific trace with lots of lower grade material - the signs have been fantastic but it just hasn't made good opal. There has been lots of shallow boulder levels and it has been a slow process breaking all the rock, especially with poor results - luckily we have had Gernot's brother, Willy, to help us and he has been a great help ( none of us ignorant Aussies can pronounce his German name so Graham called him Willy and it has stuck ). The levels are deeper than a lot of the rest of the lease with the bottom level being around 24 to 28 ft for a start but that has now stretched down to nearly 40 ft where we are now. This all looks good as we started on the shallow side and are following it down and I am sure we are near the bottom of it now - we can't go any further anyway as we are right on the boundary of the lease. There has been a lot of digging on the next lease and some terrific opal found so things are looking promising now. The thing is we have to move so much dirt to open up a hole big enough to move even my smaller machine around in - the first lift is to 24 ft then it is down into the hole to bench down another 6 ft or so for the 12 tonner to reach the bottom easily. The Mack has been invaluable moving a lot of dirt away but we have had to replace the fuel pump so it has not been working for the last month or so but, it is going again now which will be a big help. We have been getting a few exploratory drill holes put down and they have been very promising with good colour coming from the area we are now at - so, hopefully the drought is about to break on the material front. I was able to start the afternoon just before it started to rain and got some quite nice colour in a level at 27 ft and there is still 10 to 12 ft to go to the bottom - you can see in the last photo the different ground and to us mug opal miners it looks very, very good.
The worst part with not finding any good material is that it just drives you on to finding it and both Graham and I have just kept going non stop - this has not done either of us any good especially when we started nearly a month before any other miners got here and most of them have been getting some nice material since starting. We both have had a bit of a break to recharge the batteries and know that our turn is just around the corner. I know that I have neglected the website badly as well as this blog and that is not helping the cause at all. The worst part is I haven't had fresh material to work with so there has been no processing for the website - Tammy is also onto me looking for more rough parcels to put on Ebay as she has just about sold the lot. Anyway, I feel sure that all will be changing shortly and with Mitchell starting here as well, we will be giving it our best shot. The next blog won't be so far away and will be full of good news - guaranteed!
I have just put in mining photos this time showing from where we started until now.
