paper stock for insect point mounting

I’ve been out in Arizona and Panamint Valley (California) doing some insect collecting, and I find that having the microscope means I can collect smaller specimens… which means I need to mount the smaller critters.  A typical technique I use is point-mounting, and to this end you need the right kind of paper to make the point, and the right kind of glue to attach the speciment to the point.

The glue I’m trying out is BioQuip’s shellac.  It’s rather thick, and putting a small dab on a bit of paper follwed by thinning the dab with a drop of ethyl alcohol, produces a glue that seems to work out.

The paper for the points was more problematic, it’s better to not use regular index card stock as the paper will not age well.  I found that Strathmore Series 500 3ply plate-finish bristol board seems to fit the bill: acid free and 100% cotton (makes the material archival quality), thick enough to hold well to the pin and thin enough to bend the point-tip to right angles to fit the insect.  And conveniently the local artist supply house had a sheet of it.  The BioQuip point punch works well with the bristol board, knocking out points as needed.

 

Headed to the Gate from Drakes

After putting the dinghy away we upped anchor and watched the mud drain off the hook as it dragged through the remarkably clear water. The sky was nicely blue and we watched the airplanes zipping along way overhead leaving long trails of ice crystals in their path (at least that’s what I imagine the contrails to consist of, something to verify later). Wind was light, 10 knots of so, and we motored across to our crab pot stationed in 80 feet of water off the Estero.

The float was easy to find as we’re really using two floats – a foam float that was found adrift in San Francisco bay is actually attached to the pot, and a second float with a vertical wand that holds up the red nylon protest flag is attached on a 6 foot polypropylene line to the first float. The little flag makes the pot really easy to spot, as nobody else is using a little flag, and the flag’s movement stands out.

Kristen pulled Beetle alongside the float, I picked it up with the boat hook and a couple minutes later we had the trap back on board with three new crabs inside – which took a bit of undoing to remove them as they do like poking their legs through the trap’s netting. All crabs were put into the second cooler (brought along for purposes of crab transport), up main, off engine, and we slowly sailed along towards double point in the weakening breeze from behind while staring forrward at what looked to be a thick low fog hiding everything in front of us. Normally it’s foggy and Drakes and clear at the Gate, today was the opposite – super sunny to the North and total fog to the Southeast.

In the fog the wind died off to nothing, I pulled down the main to the second reef to help stabilize the boat while motoring, and we headed off into the fog. For a long while we had clear sky overhead and were completely surrounded by grey fog, more like seasmoke, then the fog closed in overhead and visibility dropped down to 100 yards. The radar was running which makes it simple to know where the shoreline is, then Bolinas, then Duxbury Reef buoy, and AIS showed where the tug & tows were – which made it straightforward to cross the shipping lanes while avoiding them.

Rounding Pt. Bonita (never saw it) brought the fog horns at the Gate into focus, and it’s easy to set a course that splits the difference between the center horn (two dissonant horns high pitched) and the South Tower horn (single very low bass horn). What was unexpected was the super low long horn from well behind – eep! a ship that was beyond the range of the electronic chart/AIS display. Turns out to have been a big green containership coming in through the channel behind us, he had slowed down to roughly our speed and it was interesting to observe a really big blog on the radar gradually sneak up towards us. First landfall was the gloom of the South Tower coming out of the fog, and then we were back in the bay, a bit before dark, with a fun weekend had up at Drakes Bay.

- rob/beetle

Sunday in Drakes Bay

Saturday was a fine afternoon, and eventually decided to try my first taking the camera gear to the beach on the dinghy; it went ok, nothing got wet, and we walked over to the Elephant seal overlook, located well above the beach where the seals haul out. Turned out I did not need the tele-extender lens as the EX1R’s built-in zoom was good enough for the distance to clearly pick up the animals from the overlook. Wind buffetting was an issue, and I expect the footage to be somewhat jumpy. Perhaps Adobe’s CS 5.5 built-in image stabilization code can help with any shaking that was recorded.

Back on board it started to get chilly the moment the sun dropped below the rim of the hills to the west and the wind started to rise (18 knots max that night, not much, but still enough to kick up chop that would make a dinghy ride out to the crab pot a wet affair). So rather than run out to the pot Kristen and I hoisted the dinghy onto the foredeck, motor and all, and popped down below with the heater running.

The heater does consume a fair bit of power, and the enginee was run for an hour to bring the battery bank up sufficiently to allow watching a movie (The Full Monty – wonderful fun) using the inverter to power the screen. Had dinghy, watched movie, turned back on the wind generator, went to sleep. Oh, and in the meantime I managed to drop one of the life jackets kept in the dinghy overboard whilst removing them from where they were clipped on to the lifelines. The jacket blew quickly downwind, and there was no good way to chase after it given the dinghy was high and dry on the pointy end of the boat.

Come morning we scanned the beaches to see if the life jacket had fetched up anywhere, and there it was – on the last rocky beach-bit prior to going around the corner and out to sea. Given the tide was dropping and the jacket was well up on the rocks, we had breakfast, then launched the dinghy for retrieval purposes. The waves were tiny (6″) at the beach, with lots of large rocks, which meant I turned off the motor and used the oars to paddle in close enough for Kristen to hop out of the bow and onto rock, make her way across the rocks and return with said life jacket. So no carnage this trip.

Now we’ve stowed the dinghy and outboard, and will be heading over to pick up the pot on the way back to San Francisco Bay.

- rob/beetle

Nov 24 at Drakes Bay

It is a rather pleasant morning now morphed into afternoon here at anchor in Drakes Bay.

We left Alameda yesterday morning at 9AM, and two hours later were motoring past the main ship channel buoys outside the Gate – extremely clear as we could see Pt. Reyes, Southeast Farallone Island, and the Air Force installation on the point outside Pillar Point Harbor – all at the same time. Wind was light from the east, of all things, so off engine and Beetle started reaching to the northwest at reasonable 5-7 knots. An hour later the wind shut down so on motor and we powered through loads of crab pot buoys (Dungeness Crab season recently opened), only to find we had powered through the transition from Easterly to the filling Westerly breeze – so off engine again and a light air uphill sail for another couple hours. Lots of birds out, no seals or whales, it’s been fairly warm (though still with jackets and fuzzy hats on), and then the wind shut down again.

I assembled the folding crab trap, Kristen baited it with the thanksgiving dinner turkey neck, and we dropped the pot in 80 feet of water just outside the limiting line set by Fish & Game, noted the GPS coordinates of the pot, and then were in with hook down just about sunset.

It was somewhat chilly last night, so the heater was run and the boat stayed toasty warm on the inside what with Kristen cooking up a batch of pasta and hamburger meat. As we have a lot of hamburger, tonight we’re thinking of handing Hamburger with pasta simply by reversing the ingredients. Will have to see if this fools anyone.

This morning the dinghy was inflated and launched, got to play with the new-to-Beetle electric air inflator pump, it worked out very well. 7 minutes of run time consuming roughly 14 watts (10 amps at 12vDC for 7 minutes). Nice part is that while the dinghy is inflating you can also be organizing the oars, fetching life jackets, and freeing the outboard motor and gas can. Kinda fun!

A 2 mile dinghy ride out to the pot, portable GPS in hand, up pot and inside were two keeper-size Dungeness male crabs, crabs were deposited into cooler brought along for that purpose, pot re-baited with chicken gizzards in the crab bait tin, and down went pot again.

Now that we have two rather large crabs, it was time to do the morning Drakes Bay tour starting at Drakes Estereo – slowly tooling along in the dinghy whilst watching the hawks fly along the hillside, harbor seals floating in the water, lots of elephant seals in the NW corner beach, a couple of people working on their surfing at the larger swell East of the Estero.

There’s one other boat anchored nearby, there were 11 boats here last night (4 sailboats and 7 fish boats), and now they’ve all headed out in different directions other than Beetle and the boat near by. It’s now 12:30pm – and I am informed that Beetle does not have a cheese grater, which is true. Something to add to the list of required boat parts.

And now topsides for a bit of a read. And almost forgot, Nibs the Black Cat is along for the ride, he’s been pretty good about exploring, hiding, burrowing, and generally being a cat that doesn’t complain too much about being on a boat. He has gone to the side and transom a number of times to look for the dock, something he expects to find once the boat has stopped moving – but to his chagrin no dock yet. Doesn’t stop him from looking, though.

Life is good from here on Beetle!

- rob

Drakes Bay Wednesday 9/5/2012

It’s been a good day 2 here at Drakes bay, the Pacific High has exited off to the west, opening up the pressure gradient with the resulting wind dying down to near zero, flat seas, and even the marine layer helped out by opening up a bit and letting in some sun for a while.

Yesterday I was the second sailboat to arrive in the anchorage, and by nightfall four more boats had arrived. One of them must have been an offshore sail-training cruise as the five people on board arrived in full fouies, life jackets, harness and tether despite the calm 2 knot breeze wafting through for most of the afternoon. And when they went to anchor everybody ran forward to crowd around the windlass to see what was going on – I hope they had a fine time on the trip up!

Today I’ve been messing about with the microscope and some seaweed picked up from the water, and it’s amazing how many little critters are in there! – ostracods, copepods, possibly some krill (though they may not be krill as they looked a bit on the small side)… lots of things zooming around in the water beneath the microscope. I need to find some identification books for marine inverts. I also id’d one of the numerous seaweed flies – appears we have coelopidae here, zillions of them, and a fair few have made it off the beach to hang out on Beetle. I had also forgotten what a calypter was, so that took a while sorting through Borror’s diptera key to find them. As there are only supposed to be four or five species of these guys on the US west coast, I’m going to go look for a species key next.

Got a bunch of photos today, some through the microscope and some of birds a fair bit a way, otherwise it has been a relaxing day.

As of this morning everyone had departed except for myself. On VHF 16 I could listen in to the USCG Tern boarding fishing boats – what species are you targeting, how many have you on board, what’s your license(s), how many crew, when was your last boarding at sea by the united states coast goard? – given the seas were flat there was hopefully nothing problematic about the boardings.

Tonight it will be movie night, plus fooling around with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to see if can get a clean photo to come through the coelopid fly.

Beetle out!

Monday Morning – drakes bay

The sun has just climbed up over San Francisco, which is easily visible from here, as is the sillouette of hills to the south; visibility is tremendous, no clouds or marine layer this morning. I got a bunch of pictures of the sunrise, hopefully some of them will come out ok.

The breeze is down to 20 knots, it was a lot windier yesterday and into last night with winds through the anchorage at 30-38 knots topping out at 47 – made for a pretty bumpy ride at anchor even with the short fetch. Two fish boats were in the anchorage last night, it must have been too windy for them to want to work the crab pots in the area.

Spent most of yesterday feeling rather smart to not have inflate the dinghy – it would have been too choppy in the bay to have an enjoyable dinghy ride, and with the water temp at 50 degrees it would be really chilling to get wet in the dinghy. The weather forecast was for temperatures to drop into the high 30′s last night, and tonight forecast is calling for high 20′s up this way – we should be back in Alameda tonight and hopefully not have too cold of a day for the sail back to the Gate. As it is we ran the diesel heater all of yesterday, not shutting it off until after watching The DaVinci Code on board. The movie was punctuated with moments when the wind generator would overspeed and the blades then automatically twist and let out an amazing high pitch racket as they shed speed – the screeching sound makes the cat look up abruptly wondering what the heck is going on out there.

Boat is semi-organized, camera gear is put away (Nikon D90 is up in the cockpit with the long lens, i’ve been trying to get pictures of the birds this morning). Looks to be another good day, wind is forecast to fade away this afternoon as another weather system sets up to the west, we’re expecting a front Wednesday that should bring rain to the area.

And now its back up to the cockpit to continue with Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (or words to that effect).

Good morning!

- rob

Drakes Bay – Sunday morning

Good morning from Drakes Bay, it’s the long holiday weekend away from the lab, and the weather pattern we’ve been having in San Frnacisco (hot, dry, sunny) is forecast to continue through today – so yesterday Kristen and I popped up north from Alameda to bring the crab pot and check in on the elephant seal (e-seal for those familiar with SEFI biologists) colony is doing; there are lots of them up on the beach and the point reyes group is monitoring them.

We got a way from the dock a couple of of hours later than planned, so missed the ebb; the flood wasn’t particularly much and we tooled on up the coast in flattish water and 1-7 knots of wind from the east, nowhere, and the west. the breeze was mostly from the east, which made it a downhill motor and between the sun and the non-existent apparent wind it was quite warm (fun for mid-January!).

Drakes Bay was declared part of a marine sanctuary a couple of years back, so no more fishing from the boat at anchor, nor can you drop a crab pot west of a specific line (approximately chimney rock to the estero). Once at the line we found loads of other crab pots (looks like two or three commercial boats are making Drakes Bay there base), rigged up ours and set it in an area somewhat clear of the commercial pots. Then on into the anchorage.

Lots of e-seals on the beach busy gargling and honking and blurping at each other. I played with the 816T microphone connected to the 702 recorder and got a fine 10 minute recording of them from a half mile off (sound carries well over the water). It was fun to play them back downbelow through Beetle’s stereo.

Last night there were two fish boats in the anchorage with us, and this morning we’re the only boat here. Not surprising, reajlly, as it’s forecast to get quite cold tonight (plus wind), with the wind backing off tomorrow. Later on this morning we’re going to run over to pull the pot and see how we did, reset pot for retrieval Monday morning, and elsewise have a pleasant day on the bay. It’s a bit cold to want to assemble the dinghy, so likely give that a miss and just hang out here.

And I’ve been experimenting with using the camera on the tripod set on the foredeck, and that’s worked ok – cuts down a lot on the bounciness of the camera and makes the image a bit more usable.

Upshot – looks to be cold, somewhat gray morning, and getting colder and windier tonight. But it sure is more fun than being back in Alameda!

Beetle, out.