Dave Edgren's father Paul demonstrates their auger drill at Yowah, which samples 9-inch holes down to 40 feet to find ironstone and precious opal. He walks through the strata they expect to hit, the screening process, and shares finds from that day's drilling.
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Okay, so this is Yawa, and this is my dad on the left-hand side here, Paul Edgren, and I'm here with him now. We're going to talk about what's going on here. So you've been coming out to Yawa for 20 years, and this is the first time you've used this bit of kit. What's going on here?
I have an Opal Lease, and this is an auger drill that drills a 9-inch in diameter hole And we have previously located a level of ironstone that's about 40 feet deep. And so this drill rig will drill this 9-inch in diameter hole, and this auger will bring up the material foot by foot till it goes to the depth that we are, and we'll be able to see what the ground levels look like through that 40-foot strata.
So what kind of stuff were you expecting it to pull up?
Well, what we want— we will go through sandstone and there will be levels of sandstone of different colors, gray, brown, and so forth. And then there will be clay, and you don't want to get into this solid clay, but you want to pick up an ironstone band, and it will be a very solid silica-colored band. And hopefully you would find in that band precious opal.
Okay, so This giant thing, you said 40 feet, so that's like more than 10 meters.
Yeah.
And it's going to go down into the ground, pull stuff up like a drill bit. It is a giant drill bit. But, um, what is on the end of this? Like, we see the drill, but then he's got this little blue cage or something. Who is that, by the way? What's his name?
That's Peter. Peter and Tanya have a mining business here and also sell opal jewelry, opal supplies. And also mine themselves. And what you're looking at at the end of the drill rig is a turning trommel with a half-inch screen in it, and it lets the sand go through. But if there's any bits of ironstone, they'll come through out of this trommel, and then you can look at them as they come through the trommel and drip on the ground. And it's nice to be able to do this when the sun's shining, because if there is any precious opal, it'll sparkle somewhat in the sunlight. Now you can see it coming out the end of the trommel and dumping on the ground. And that is sandstone that you see there, but if there was an opal level, it would bring it up on the auger.
Okay, so we dug 4 holes today, and you have Elise out there, and you've dug different kinds of holes with different kinds of machines. These were tiny holes, and you're just hoping for basically even one little bit of opal to show you that at that level there's opal.
It's a very valuable gem and it's not easy to find. And as we were drilling, we talked to the driller and he told us about another drill rig guy that has a rig like this, and last year he drilled 1,000 holes and found nothing.
1,000 holes?
Yes.
So if he'd found opal in one hole, would it have paid for his digging?
Sometimes if you get onto really valuable precious opal in your two hands, in a two handful of opal, you could have a quarter of a million dollars.
Wow. So how much opal have you found in the 20 years that you've been opal mining?
First of all, I've only done it like, oh, 2 weeks, 3 weeks at a time, maybe once or twice a year, and certainly not in the hot summer because it gets sometimes as hot as 50 degrees out here. But in the time that I've been here, I've found probably $10,000, $15,000 worth.
Wow. Well, thanks so much, Dad, for talking to us. This has been
