Friday, August 1, 2003

Greetings,

Another cool day and a bit windy but with patches of blue sky occasionally and one or two sharp showers during the day. It started to get quite warm about lunch time and sitting in the sun was downright hot with one of our plastic clown suits on.

Kerith and I took off for the mine about 10:30 and spent the day till 5:00 p.m. I was underground making slow progress trying to find bottom in the flat between the two West Crosscuts. I filled several sacks with small gem twins and the odd miniature specimen. Byron was collecting only a few feet away on the south side of the South West Crosscut and was in a productive zone yielding slightly matte finish large cubes and twins that were hazy inside and not gem but without the typical white centers we encountered in the Black Sheep Pocket. This is very good wholesale material with an occasionally nice specimen. Other underground news is that the North West Crosscut is finally mucked out and ready for another blast heading toward the quarry face, which will give us a second way out, but we're still probably 25' from doing that. We now have access to the north side of the North West Crosscut, which has a fair amount of material showing.

At the face in the main tunnel the last blast has been mucked out and timber put in, we are still not quite on the vein but a few oddball little pockets showed up. One slightly larger than fist-sized pocket contained light lime green cubes of fluorite dusted with micro galena crystals surrounded by massive crystalline galena. Will check it out closer today when we go up with Simon Harrison and Ralph Sutcliffe. Kerith spent the day in the quarry walking and picking up Frosterley marble (the jet black limestone with snow white rugose corals scattered in it) and reading.

We had a dinner party for ourselves, Simon, Ralph, Jonina and Byron. Kerith prepared a true Mexican enchilada feast and about the time we finished Dave Beadle and his daughter Kara showed up so we had about six different conversations going in the small living room of Burnbrae. It all broke up about 9:45 and we went to bed.

Kerith and I are taking off Monday-Wednesday next week to go up to Scotland to the Castle Douglas area so there will be few reports between then and now. That's it from St. John's Chapel, this morning is bright, sunny and warm and with a very light breeze, a glorious "proper" English summer day.

Best Regards,

Cal & Kerith

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