
Each year, come the end of August, the summer’s frenzy of activity around the mine comes to an abrupt halt when the pallets containing the season’s harvest are picked up by the shipper. Everything just disappears and is pretty much out of our control until the time it shows up, usually six to eight weeks later, at a shipping warehouse in an industrial section of Los Angeles. After the shipment is gone we will spend a day tidying up around the mine and closing down, have one last pint at the Blue Bell, say our good-byes to local friends, and everyone then disburses for his or her journey back home. Then, for the most part, we wait.
Not that there aren’t a multitude of other chores awaiting us back home, like catching up on all the unpaid bills that seem to accumulate while we’re off in the English countryside. I’ve always fancied myself a geologist, not an accountant, however, and there certain things I would really rather be doing, if you understand what I mean. It’s at this point in our yearly cycle that we shift gears from mining to preparing and selling in order to make the money it will take to go back and dig again the next summer. And for the better part of two months there’s little we can do. Now, mind you, we always send and/or carry back a few pieces in order to give a taste of things to come on the UKMV website and at the Denver show each September. Because of baggage weight restrictions and the high cost of international post for light-weight things such as rocks, this usually amounts to no more than around a dozen or so fairly small pieces. The main event will have to wait until everything slowly makes its way around the globe on a container ship.
When all goes according to plan, our pallets of binned fluorite are put into a container and loaded onboard a container ship, which leaves England about a week after pickup at the mine. From there, the ship crosses the Atlantic, passes through the Panama Canal, and finally make port in Los Angeles about five weeks later. However, the fall is hurricane season in the Atlantic, and if there is bad weather in the Caribbean the ship may port on the East Coast of the US, instead. Our shipment will then be unloaded for transport by rail across the country. If this happens, all bets are off as to when it may arrive in Los Angeles. Evidently the national rail network here is rather antiquated and has nowhere near the capacity it needs to deal with the demands of modern freight traffic. One year our ship made it successfully to the West Coast only to spend two weeks anchored off coast due to a dockworker’s strike.
And then there’s US Customs to deal with. Mineral specimens, classified as “un-cut semiprecious gemstones” are exempt from duty and taxes when brought into this country, so our broker often has the necessary paperwork filed and can get the shipment released within a week of it’s arrival. Customs, perhaps just to show that they’re doing something to protect us from the rest of the universe, can hold shipments, seemingly at random, for inspection. This happened to us a few years back, which meant that our fluorite languished in a warehouse for another couple weeks before someone got around to checking it, presumably, for illegal drugs or undocumented aliens trying to sneak into the country. In addition to having to wait the additional time to get our shipment, we got an additional bill from the government for their services.
Once we do get our shipment releases, the clock begins ticking and we have only a few days to retrieve it from the warehouse before we start incurring storage charges. The first time we shipped back, we made arrangements with a local trucking firm to have it delivered to us at Cal’s place in Fallbrook where we process and store it, only to find out that the cost of having it moved from western Los Angeles to northern San Diego County was close to what we had paid to get it all the way from England. Each year since, we have hired a U-Haul truck and picked it up ourselves. What this means is that, when we get notification that the shipment has been released by customs, Cal has to rent the truck and round up some extra hands to help shift all the stuff while I drive the 400+ miles from San Francisco to Fallbrook. The next morning about 4 AM we hit the freeways, hoping to miss much of the morning traffic, which can get truly awful by 8 on a weekday morning. First stop is the broker’s office to pick up the necessary paperwork, then to the warehouse, where we get in line with all the other truckers waiting to make pickups. Almost all are large commercial trucks that can back into a loading dock to receive their shipments. Being small fry with a U-Haul, we wait in the parking lot. If we’re lucky, the forklift driver in the warehouse isn’t overworked and behind schedule, and is willing to load the pallets into the rental truck for us. If not, we have to break the pallets down and load the truck by hand. Last year we got lucky and were back in Fallbrook by 11 AM, but this is not always the case.
The uncertainty of not knowing just when the shipment will arrive and be available for pickup each year means that yours truly has to hang around and be available to drive south on short notice around the end of September each year. The other day I had the bright idea of doing a Google search on the internet to see if there were any websites that listed the location of commercial ocean-going vessels. Guess what, there are, and it looks like our vessel is currently off the coast of Baja headed towards LA. Isn’t the internet wonderful? Practically anything you want to know is out there somewhere, if you know how to look for it. In theory, the ship should dock tomorrow. If we get off without any complications in customs, I will likely be making that exciting drive down I-5 to Southern California about this time next week.
Stay tuned for more.








