Thats a great tip Matty,just like gold you need to concentrate efforts in the most likely places,might have to get the family another dog,one with a good nose,unlike my last dog who would refuse to get off the couch…lol.Thanks again
I spent 6mths working in the Chathams in the mid nineties and used to find whale vertebrae in the dunes near Waitangi…if only I’d known what else to look for!!!
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Hey sorry i haven’t logged on to Paydirt for ages and missed ya post - yep the Chathams defo gets a little gris!
Be worth a few quid…
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A recent find reported in the news…
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I’ve been looking for that stuff for years. Im up in northland on the eastcoast and whether through ignorance or its just not here I don’t know but we’ll done
Can I ask what’s a piece that weight worth
Don’t know the price, seems to vary a lot.
Once we had the genuine piece to compare it to it became alot easier to find.
You have probably found it and thought 'nah" and chucked it.
Similar size and quality chunk went for $360 on trademe recently
Also be very cautious who you give money or ambergris to. This stuff does worse things to people heads than gold.
Cheers for that stuck a few hot needles in quite a few sponges
Will keep looking
will steer this back on the right topic…An old girlfriend of mine(she was not old but this was a while ago)took me to her family crib at Bull Creek, it was located very close to the coast and was starting to suffer the effects of the rising sea so her dad started to build a new sea wall to which the DCC took exception to resulting in a $10,000 legal battle over it’s construction…inside the crib amongst the collection of flotsam collected over the years was a strange mottled waxy blob on the shelf about the size of a large elongated potato…I picked it up and asked the father if he knew what it was to which he replied that he only picked it up many years ago because he had seen nothing like it and thought it was unusual so picked it up…well I told him that I think it could be Ambergris and he should have someone look at it and to keep it in a more secure place. That day I had glued a four leaf clover to the wall(true story) this I have been told worked very well as the DCC stopped its legal action over the wall…my girlfriends father sold the strange waxy blob for I think a few thousand and built a new sea wall with the money 
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Lovin this topic and the adventures it could bring but My misses thought i was crazy when i started getting gold fever any ideas how I’m going to explain now that i got big sperm whale shit fever
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Haven’t been on here for ages, but thought i best add to the posts and say that:
*WestcoastDigger: unfortunately what you’re picking off the beach does not seem to be ambergris, certainly the large white piece i’d bet money just fro the photo lone that it isn’t… just thought it best to say (although its never pleasant having to say that) as if you;re spending time looking for and collecting that its probo not the way forwards sorry. Happy to confirm your finds if you sent a tiny sample (happy to sen it back of course).
*As mentioned above people need to exercise extreme caution when buying thru places like Trademe, Ebay, etc as there’s been a lot of cases of people (usually with the best of intent genuinely believing they have found ambergris) selling fake ambergris… a few positive reviews is meaningless if they have sold to others that have never seen real ambergris before either as they can / will believe that have also purchased the genuine product, and trust me - I’m speaking from experience here as i (stupidly in hindsight) decided to buy a collection on Trademe from a seller (‘dragon99999’) that had some pieces that looked genuine enough from the photo’s, + had some positive feedback on mixed in with hundreds of trades + offered a refund if it wasn’t genuine…this last point made me feel comfortable enough to buy it even though this was the first (and now last!) time i had ever purchased a sizable amount without having previous history buying legit ambergris from someone before.
Short story long i spent 7k and it took over a year and only with the culmination of the NZ Courts to get my money back - in essence a full refund doesn’t mean that much if the person has a fanatical believe that they have genuine ambergris, even after i had sent it away NZ’s most established ambergris company / broker who also confirmed it not to be ambergris. At the time there were a few sellers on Trademe selling fake gris - John from the West Coast / “Ambergris.Oil” was another that i bought a piece off but backed out of the deal once i’d introduced myself post auction as a experienced ambergris broker, then attempted to slander me via feedback - which Trademe shut down pretty quick.
After my court case with dragon99999, which Trademe were very interested to know the outcome of (after all Trademe knows nothing about ambergris) it seems to have tidied up the other sellers that had fake auctions (making me think that some of them maybe do know the they are selling fake ambergris) which is a good thing but yeah, personally i had to got thru a very long drawn out process to recover my coin on that trade and i wont buy anything without seeing it first, even with all the money back gaurentees in the world!
*A couple of higher grade pieces attahed - see if you can spot the ambergris beak imbedded in the gris. This is a pretty commen sight with ambergris and the larger the piece the more you might expect to see beak… not that all ambergris should have visible beak but the larger the piece the more you would exoect to see it. The beak becomes embedded with the amberris inside the whale after the ambergris ha been secreted from the lower intestine but before the whale has shat it out. Conversely its extremely rare to find anything else embedded in ambergris (like stones, shells etc) and is usually a almost sure sign that what you’ve found it somenthing other than ambergris.
Any.way, happy hunting whatever treasure you guys are looking for!
Matt
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