Dig Down And Discover The Difference Between Gems And Grit

You know the old expression, “If it sounds too good to be true, then who cares, do it anyway.” Well, that’s more or less what I did when a Swiss traveler assured me he’d just been traveling with a Danish guy who found an $80,000 sapphire in the gem fields of Queensland. Not that I had to have such a gaudy bauble. A $20,000 sapphire would have been just fine.

I took a bus to the town of Emerald in northeast Australia, where I discovered I needed a car to get to the gem fields. Fortunately, the gas station next to the bus terminal rented vehicles.

“You’ll be wanting a UTE?” the clerk asked.

“No, I just want the cheapest car for rent.”

“Then you want a UTE,” she said slowly, suddenly realizing I was an American, thus severely lacking in the brain department. “Fifty dollars.”

She pointed to a flatbed pick-up truck with “roo-bars” - a steel-enforced grill to protect your vehicle from kangaroos, which apparently can’t recognize a highway. I nodded my understanding and jumped in.

If you’ve ever driven in Australia, you know that like the English, they drive on the wrong side of the road, and put the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car. The clutch, brake and accelerator were in their regular order. The gear shift was still in the middle but I had to operate it with my left hand.

My biggest problem was I kept switching on the windshield wipers when I wanted to turn. (Hopefully, most Australians now interpret this as a turn signal on rental vehicles.) Also, I kept getting in on the wrong side of the car. To avoid looking like a world-class doorknob, I’d fiddle with the seat, then grab a map from the glove compartment before walking around to the side with the steering wheel.

I drove 45 minutes to a town appropriately named Sapphire. Every structure in this town was selling gems. And the entire area looked like it had been attacked by a mob of giant gophers; there were piles of dirt and rock everywhere.

I went to Pat’s Fossicking Center. I didn’t know what “fossicking’ was but it sounded like something I needed to learn. Pat charged me $4 for a bucket of “sapphire-rich” dirt, and her friend Ron showed me how to “fossick” it, or sift through it to find sapphires. This is how it works:

You dump some dirt into a metal spaghetti strainer shaped like a tambourine and shake it. The dirt falls out and you are left with some dirty rocks. Then, you soak the rocks in a barrel of water and jiggle them so the sapphires, which are heavier than regular rocks, will sink to the bottom.

Next, you flip the tambourine over like you’re shaking a cake out of a tin, and - voila! - the sapphires, if there are any, should be sitting on top. They can be any color, but normally they look like tiny chunks of green beach glass.

I didn’t have a natural talent for this. I kept spilling the rocks while jiggling them in the water. And I couldn’t spot the sapphires very well. The other amateur fossickers, kids and grandmas, were pulling up sapphires every 10 seconds. It was as if I was sitting at a broken slot machine.

By the end of “class,” I’d found a few tiny bits of possibly sapphire - or petrified bird droppings - after sorting through two buckets ($8 worth) of dirt. Pat examined my treasure trove and said one gem was good enough to cut, which would cost me $18. She assured me that when cut it would suddenly have a retail value of $31 - although she wouldn’t buy it from me.

The prospect of sitting on the side of the road in a folding chair competing with all 500 other gem shops to peddle my 0.5-carat, phlegm-colored sapphire didn’t excite me.

Anyway, now that I knew the basics, I headed for Heritage Mine (and Tourist Gem Shop) for a tour of a “working mine.” For $5, Kevin, one of the owners, took me 60 feet under ground and showed me the best rock layer for finding sapphires: the basalt. This factoid didn’t do me much good, I told him, because I wasn’t going to stick around long enough to scoop a 60-foot hole.

Instead, Kevin sold me a one-month Fossicking License (another $5) and drew me a map on the back of a brochure that she promised would lead me to “a good fossicking area.” My first treasure map! I rented a pick-ax, shovel and strainer from the Capricornia Gems and Crafts Shop for $3 (with a $120 security deposit) and headed out.

When I arrived at the spot Kevin drew for me on the map, I ran into an old man who told me I needn’t bother to dig there because there was “nothin’ diggin’ fer left.” He directed me to another spot.

“Jus goh along this dert roahd forabit, stick to the raight, then take ah left over the grid,” he explained. “You cen ignorah the ‘Noh Trespassing Sign’ ‘cause it’s outdated. But doahn’t goh down those othah roahds. If yah stert fossicking on someone’s land they’ll prahbably blow yer head off.”

Eventually, I made it to the Washpool Area. There were a few other people fossicking in the area so I figured it must be a good place. I took out my pick and shovel and started looking for a good spot to dig. The place was littered with holes. I finally chose one and struck it with my pick ax. The ground was hard and filled with “billy” rocks (large stones). It took 45 minutes to make a hole big enough to hold a basketball. I moved on to find easier digging.

I whacked away at the ground for a few hours without finding a single sapphire. All I had to show for my efforts was what looked like a series of latrines for a Boy Scout troop.

I took a break and started up a conversation with fellow flailer Austin, 70, who had been fossicking since his retirement 10 years before. He had at least 15 strainers and three barrels of water. He told me I was going about things all wrong; I needed water. I told him I had to get my UTE back to the rental lady soon or she’d mulch my credit card. In the time I had left, Austin let me help him with his willowby, a strainer device. After dunking and straining for an hour, I found a sapphire the size of a grit.

All that effort was pretty disappointing, especially after Austin showed me a ping-pong ball-sized sapphire he’d pulled out of the same hole the week before, valued at around $15,000.

The funny thing about fossicking is it’s addictive, like gambling, only cheaper. And it’s certainly a better workout than pulling a one-armed bandit. If Overeaters Anonymous and Gamblers Anonymous ever merge, sapphire-hunting would make the perfect field trip.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: IF YOU GO Dig for sapphires with a lightweight electric jackhammer at Silk ‘n’ Sapphires Mine, P.O. Box 92, Rubyvale, Queensland 4702, Australia. Phone/Fax: (079) 85 4307. Cost: $60 for 1/2 day, $95 for full day. Identify sapphires at Pat’s Gems-Tourist Fossicking Center, Sapphire, Queensland, Australia. Phone: (079) 85 4544. Australian Tourist Commission, Century Plaza Towers, 2049 Century Plaza East, Los Angeles, CA 90067. PHone: (310) 229-4870 or (847) 296-4900. Gems and Precious Stones (on gemology, mineralogy, geology): http:/ /geology.wisc.edu/gems “Gemstones.” Hall, Cally, Dorling Kindersley 1994. “Gems: Their Sources, Descriptions, and Identification.” Webster, Robert, Butterworth-Heinemann 1994. “Australia - A Travel Survival Kit.” Lonely Planet Publications 1996, $24.95.