THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 24, 1995 TAG: 9509210220
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 07 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: STAFF REPORT
DATELINE: NAGS HEAD LENGTH: Short : 43 lines
An 11-year-old boy has found a sapphire bigger than a golf ball while panning for gems in a bucket of mountain dirt at a tourist attraction.
Ryan Winebarger discovered the bluish rock Wednesday after paying $20 to dig through the rocks and soil brought from a gem mine in the mountains of western North Carolina.
The sapphire weighed 458.2 carats, according to Virgil Lanning, who runs Beach Gem Stones.
``It's pretty, sort of dark bluish,'' said Ryan, who lives near Hickory and was vacationing here with his family.
``I don't know how much it might be worth,'' said his father, James Winebarger.
Lanning said a top-quality sapphire of that size could sell for several thousand dollars.
However, he said it is very difficult to determine whether an uncut sapphire has the quality required to make it valuable.
``You just never know until you cut it,'' he said. ``It has to be cut into a single stone to be worth that kind of money, and it costs several thousand dollars to do that kind of a cut,'' Lanning said. ``And if the quality isn't there, the sapphire isn't worth all that much.
``Most people have them cut into smaller stones, which doesn't cost so much.''
Lanning said the gem was one of the biggest sapphires found in his operation since he opened the store eight years ago.
Ryan Winebarger and his father, who planned to return to Hickory Thursday, said they weren't sure what they would do with the stone.
James Winebarger said they live near the gem mines and had read about bigger sapphires.
The bucket of dirt Ryan dug through came from a mine near Spruce Pine, Lanning said. by CNB