Wednesday, June 11, 2003

Good Morning. The weather - about the same as this time yesterday. The sun comes out, the clouds move in, the sun comes out again, the clouds retake the playing field. Yesterday it carried on like that most of the day, including a few moments of torrential rain. In the afternoon the wind came up and dried everything off nicely, but was so strong at one point that it was blowing loose bits of timber around the mine landing.

After Monday's chaos, yesterday got back to a fairly normal workday. Jonina headed out first thing to get the shopping and other errands finished. Byron, now mobile again, headed off to the mine with Dave, and I took to sawing up some specimens. Between all the spray thrown off by the saw and the occasional rain shower, I was pretty well soaked by lunchtime and decided that enough specimens had been trimmed for the moment. When we set up the garage I had the foresight to bring a complete set of raingear from the mine, just for these occasions. Unfortunately, I didn't bring two. Sarah, who was manning the water guns had a cold this week and was more in need of them than I.

After finishing with the saw I dried off the best I could and headed down the dale to the mine. Dave was busy timbering the southern portion of the West Cross Cut. Some more rocks had come down over night, and another large one was threatening. It looks like this area will take some work before we can get back to the face for more collecting. As if to compensate, however, Byron had been busy working the wall in the northern part and had opened up a fair sized seam of fluorite. There is a real nice looking plate of gemmy crystals in the roof. Unfortunately, it is rather large and in there rather tightly. While Byron took a break, I worked at some of the rocks around it, but failed to find the one bit that is holding everything in place. At least we have a mission for the day. Today's photo is of Dave in damage control mode.

After knocking off for the day I headed to the Grey Bull to meet up with a Lloyd Lewellyn, a collector from down in Norfolk who visited us last year. Lloyd had just returned from a family vacation in Florida and was in need of some R&R to recover from the experience, so is spending a few days around Weardale. While chatting over a pint, we met a young lady who was a mining engineer from Turkey. Evidently, she met and got married to a British engineer while on a gold mining project in her home country. When the project ended, they both moved back to his home ground, which is Weardale. Not the sort of person one would expect to turn up in a small town pub, but then I suppose a group of American miners is even more unusual. I did enjoy her combined Middle Eastern-Geordie sounding accent.

Today we'll be back to collecting and timbering at the mine. Lloyd is supposed to show up for coffee before heading out. Jonina has a fresh batch of specimens to wash so should be busy with that.

On a sad note, I have just heard that Otto Komerick, a miner and collector friend from California who helped us the first year has passed away. Otto could sometimes be a difficult person, but he worked hard for us when we were trying to get this project off the ground.

Stay tuned for more…

Cheers,

Jesse, Byron and Jonina

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