Originally, I was just going to cheat on this one by fossicking at the Mackay Show (which I still did earlier in the year, just in case real fossicking didn't work out).
But after giving it some thought, I felt it wasn't capturing the true nature of the adventure list. So, after doing some research, I realised that Rubyvale was only 4.5hr drive from Mackay, so knowing my Mum's love of jewellery, I invited Mum to do this one with me and Dad decided he wanted to come too. So, the three of us set off on Friday and stayed two nights in Rubyvale.
We booked in with Lady Luck Fossicking Tour on Sunday. So, at 8am we headed to the nearby town Sapphire and followed the crew out to a fossicking area, ominously named Grave Hills. It certainly is a different kind of lifestyle out there, with fun signs like 'If you dig on this claim, you will be shot!'.
The fossicking itself, whilst fun, was actually quite hard, hot and dirty work. Certainly not something you would want to be doing everyday out in the hot sun. We were out digging for approx 2.5hrs to fill a bucket each.
After digging, we took our buckets back to another site for the wash. The tour company told us at the beginning of the tour that fossicking is like winning the lotto or fishing and that it is just luck if you do find something of any great value.
To know what to look for they did add some sapphires to our wash, so it's hard to determine the amount of sapphire's we may have found vs the ones they just added to the wash. However, I was the first one of the groups who found a small zircon. Apparently, they do not add any zircons to the wash, so I definitely found that one myself. Not sure I have anything big enough or valuable enough to do anything with them, but this was what I ended up with after 4-5hrs of hard work.
And if anyone is wondering (like I originally did) why Anna and Tess put Fossicking on the list it's because of this joke that Jill did in her High School Yearbook:
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