CFMS Trip to Two Tourmaline Mines in Two Days!!!

Everyone turned in the mine paperwork (BTW – the OceanView has this process perfected! Once you have registered for a day at the mine you get a password to their site and access to maps to the mine and waivers – so you can have everything filled out and ready to go when you get there!) and filled out the CFMS paperwork we were each assigned a space at a sifting/rinsing table – it was a full house!

The tables are arranged around a fairly large pile of mine dump – specially sourced for our group by Jeff (the mine owner) who gave us a detailed talk about the proceedure.

This is how it works:

• You go to the pile and fill your bucket (these are also provided by the mine)
• Bring the bucket to your station and gently dump it into the top screen (the mine supplies two screens that are stacked by size with a 1/2 inch screen atop a 1/4 inch screen).
• By hand you pull out the large rocks and rinse them in your water pan (three people to two water pans) – now just because these may be “rocks” doesn’t mean you don’t want them. I saved several pieces that are excellent examples of California Pegmatite (the mix of materials that tourmaline grows in).
• Shake the dirt and smaller pieces down to the second screen
• Rinse the first screen and discover what you have…
• Shake the second screen, rinse and repeat…go get another bucket!

The secret is the more dirt you move the more you find! At the OceanView we had Rudy and his wife next to us – they found two “BIG” pinks (at least 3inches by one inch around) and a green to match!!!

Halfway through the day we went on a tour of the mine – they are working a new area at the OceanView and Jeff’s insider tip was to come back in a couple weeks – he feels this is going to be a really productive area!

This is one of the few “working” mines in the Pala area – so being able to walk through the areas they are currently excavating was an honor.

This is a great look over the system that takes fresh air deep into the mine at a pocket that had been mined previously (this “money pocket” was the 49’er hole and was sold to Tiffany’s).

At the end of the day the miners came up to the staging area from working on the new pocket and while one them was talking to Bobby, I heard “Wow – we have never had a group that went through the pile in one session – your group really knows how to move dirt!”

Thank you to Jeff and his great crew at the OceanView – we left dirty, sore and hungry.

Fee Dig Info: http://www.digforgems.com/