Two days driving, one day in Coobs, a flying stopover with the family and I still have to go bloody opal mining, well, pillarbashing at least. It’s a problem I know, but in for a penny, in for a pound.. By some miracle I go back to an old spot I worked years ago and discovered the mine had been flooded and had newly collapsed areas that revealed some gorgeous precious opal.To be fair, we do have over 30 years of experience and i reckon a bit of help from the Big Guy, (not Joe Biden BTW) Not bad for 4 hours on a Saturday morning. One day we will find so much opal that we will be able to retire.. and go opal mining.

Here are some interesting excerpt from out youtube comments detailing excellent history from the early days of New Hans Peak:

Very nice; just sitting there, waiting for YOU! Was it the original Hans Peak or Hans Peak Extension up on the Southern Rise? I mined the latter in a claim next to the Greeks who found multies circa 1990 and turned that area into a pine forest of pegs in the space of a weekend. 2 slips from our claim carrying thin gemmy trace (a bit like what you found) intersected in THEIR claim, not ours of course, shat themselves and made multiple lines of beautiful stuff. Oddly, a lot of it had cotton in it, even the best of it, and it faced better from the side than the top. I believe a lot of it was chopped up for inlay. Again, congrats.

Yes mate, it’s the south western corner of New Hans Peak, I misspoke in the video, not deliberately, but in my ranting I said Old instead of New. I know most of those blokes, the storied of the Greeks (Nick the Baker) and partners finding inches thick crystal around the shafts are legendary.. Cotton is the #1 problem here but there always seems to be a trade off hey, it’s either diamonds like parts of Olympic, 8 Mile or Andamooka, where its almost impossible to find, or you can dig kilos of cracky stuff on Zorba Extension or cottony crystal in Hans Peak or 11 Mile.. I think that's why I like Old 15 Mile so much, still very clean and relatively stable material but not so hard to find, well that ued to be the case anyway.. I’m pretty happy as I will slice most of this parcel up for doublets, cotton and all and see how they go as pendants and earrings. Still very beautiful but certainly not top dollar.. I wish I was mining seriously in those days but I was just a kid noodling the dumps and hearing the stories..

@mikeoliver5671

11 months ago

 @Opaldigger  We were originally set up (tunnelling machine, blower) at the Southern end of a N-S 100x50 claim with little success. We cut through one beautiful thin vertical running at 90degrees to the drive, but knew nothing about verticals' direction back then and kept going past it. There were 3 groups of us including Nick's team and another mob well to the W of the Extension. I knew one of the blokes from that partnership and they were doing well, but had it pegged out all around. I went away one weekend (girlfriend in Pt. Augusta) and came back to madness --- pegs, Utes, drills, 4WDs everywhere --- after the Greeks had let it out what they'd found. The RUSH was on!! Not as big nor nearly as productive as Zorba Extension (the New and New-New Fields, LOL ) a few years before but several groups found dough. We drilled two shafts about 2-3m apart in the NE corner of our claim close to the Greeks and brought up a lot of material on 3 levels; a lot of dry-looking thick grey potch in the top level, thin blue-green crystal in the middle level and pretty red-grey from the bottom. Don't remember depths. Something is telling me the crystal level was about 66', would that be right? Anyway, one of the shafts also brought up a red-grey, munted shell worth about $200. NOTHING special. All up, about $400, pretty good for 2 shafts. By the time we got back into town on dusk to have a beer at the Opal Inn, the rumour-mill had gone wild and plenty of blokes came up and slapped our backs/shook our hands, because --- get this --- they'd "heard" we'd drilled up 20 grand's worth of red-blue . HA! Within a week, 2 prominent Greek buyers offered us 50K for the claim, based on no evidence at all since they had not seen what we drilled up. They must have spoken to Nick, next door. True story; I knew them well. There were 4 of us. We took a vote and knocked it back, unanimously, cocky/confident it was going to do much better than that. The joke was on us. After 8 months, breakdowns after breakdowns, endless in-fighting over % and where to drive (was nuts!), we found 65K all up. Divvied up 4 ways after expenses it was not even decent wages. The two slips we had carried trace only, pretty but skinny and shot with cotton. Those two slips' levels bottomed out and intersected about 15m from our NE corner. The Greeks got the bonanza. I was disappointed by the yield, but happy when that corner dried up and we went our separate ways. I heard a while later that one of the four of us (original claim-owner) went back and worked the bottom level which would have been easy since it was only about 2-3 feet in our floor, and did well, apparently. Nice, quiet bloke. Goodonim.

@Opaldigger

@mikeoliver5671

11 months ago

 @Opaldigger  P.S. re this: "I know most of those blokes, the storied of the Greeks (Nick the Baker) and partners finding inches thick crystal around the shafts are legendary.". I got to know Nick pretty well. We used their ream shaft to get our tunnelling machine down and went 50-50 on the opal we found driving into our connected shafts, so our claims were connected. Cheerful bloke, hard worker. I saw some of their best stuff, about 18-20mm thick, 10c to 50c sized pieces (some bigger), gem red-blue, gorgeous stuff, but even that stuff was shot with cotton. What amounted to big money was the volume that they found. Hundreds of ounces of tops . Nick was one lucky bastard. A couple years later, he teamed up with a couple of Croatians at the NW end of East Pacific extension and found eye-boggling vertical-bricks the size of shoe boxes (I have photos) of red-grey. Their better stuff was smaller and looked a lot like 8-mile. A few people would've done their dough on that stuff. Most turned out to be cracky (it was at the most Southern end of the Zorba Extensions). I bought their small chips about which they'd been careless, leaving the gemmy small stones in with the grey. After selling me two baby-baths of chips they woke up and priced it out of my range. Here's the irony; my mate and I had the claim next door, again! They had two slides facing each other, making a trough of opal-carrying motherlode and told us it ran towards our claim. We were crazy-hopeful, opened up and drove thataway, finding grey verticals running towards them which we assumed would turn to colour as we got closer to the boundary. WRONG. As if drawn by a ruler, another slide cut off the corridor facing into their claim, smack-bang on the boundary. All of our (worthless) grey material, thousands of ounces, was behind that slide in our claim. That's how I found out that opal's where it IS, and never where it ain't. It's funny looking back, but at the time --- heartbreak.

@Opaldigger

11 months ago

 @mikeoliver5671  oh man, that IS heartbreaking. Nick was my first boss at the old bakery after a few odd Jobs for Ross Chatfield. I bumped into him and Maxine at Costco a couple of months ago and have been meaning to drop into their cafe. That sounds like Hoobin claim. Another legendary patch!

@Opaldigger

11 months ago

 @mikeoliver5671  We found very good quality shells on East Pacific back towards Painters / Old 6 Mile. I suppose the opal steadily gets better as you go towards old 7 Mile or Olympic.

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@mikeoliver5671

11 months ago

 @Opaldigger  No worries; go for it.

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@mikeoliver5671

11 months ago

 @Opaldigger  The Hoobin bros. were about 4-00mSE away on the N edge of East Pacific. I bought some of their small stuff, but saw one of their larger parcels. Gemmy red-blue verticals, heavily chocolate-stained-ironstone skin. Eye-watering stuff, out of my league at that time. From memory, there was a lot of blue ground around them. Their material was banked up against the blue ground, not 'made' by a slide apparently. Similar material was found at the 6-mile only about 100m in from the 8-mile road way back in the 80s. One parcel I saw had been blown to conchoidal chips and pretty 'sugar', as the level/opal dropped down about 2' behind the face. I'm currently in LRidge, waiting for the Opal Festival next week Just saw about 3 ounces of rubbed CP red-grey, maybe $400-500/ounce stuff in a jar with water. ASKING price: $15,000. Dreamin'.

@Opaldigger

11 months ago

 @mikeoliver5671  aah, it’s funny how the stories conflate, I always heard that Shane’s patch was between two slides facing each other, whereas what you’ve detailed seems to suggest the typical Chinese whispers (no pun intended) of several facts becoming one rumour.. Thanks again for your insights mate. I was saying to a miner up there the other day, imagine how many stories have been lost in over a century of SA opal mining. Gotta try and preserve what we have left I reckon. Oh, that was on the back of his story about the gang of Yugoslav’s who had a ‘pub’ in a fitted out bus on Old Hans Peak in the 60’s and how three blokes in a row fell head first down a shaft. When the police asked how it was possible, all 80 or so maintained that they were playing soccer and all chased the ball head first down the hole hahahaha

@mikeoliver5671

11 months ago

 @Opaldigger  Painters, lovely opal, on the NW edge of Olympic. I checked several shafts there around 1984 (winch and generator), but no cigar. The worked ground was blocky; very dangerous. Some of the 7-mile (again, mostly verticals) had cotton problems. Weird, coral-y looking stuff. A mate of mine found a lovely thick crystal vertical in one of the ramps of an open cut there. Largest piece was 20 ounces! Orange-green. Thick bars, separated by water bars, pretty stuff. It had been clipped and walked/driven over many times, but missed. He spotted it after rain. Incredible luck. He had a small gouging pick with him and dug it out in about 3 hours. 78K, and he was just walking around, looking for unworked ground to peg, not even pillar-bashing. It's where it IS, and never where it's ain't, but you gotta be LOOKING, sometimes where you least expect it. In the ramp *shakes head*. True stories of ridiculous LUCK abound. You know The Underground Mine in Crowder's Gully road, opposite and below The Big Winch? They were doing a concrete ramp to the main doors with a coupla steps and needed to use a post-hole digger for the bannister posts. They were turning it and after about a foot or so they heard crunch-CRUNCH and brought up a small alluvial pocket of nice green crystal. I saw the faded photos they took of the hole, dirt and opal. 17K, from memory, and they'd been walking over it for months. Every time I drive to, from and around CPedy I am conscious of the fact that I am driving over millions of $s worth of unfound opal, all over the place. It's a matter of outrageous, flukey, right-place-right-time LUCK.

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@Opaldigger

11 months ago

 @mikeoliver5671 Brilliant, I reckon the Goughs still had quite a few pieces at that green crystal in their showcase there even when Trevor Berry was running it. All crazed after many years. But there was very good quality stuff up higher in the gully from what I’ve heard. I still dream of finding good 7 Mile opal. Probably one of my ‘Unicorn’ field.

Lochy and Shannon from World Class Opal and Kimberleyopal respectively, embark on another week of outrageous adventure in the dying weeks of May 2022.

Fortunately only the weeks died, but we survived and lived to tell the tale of rare and massive precious opal shells that appeared in the least expected place, as is often the case..