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| Map of the paddle trails close to Bear Island. This map comes from the NC Parks Hammocks Beach web site. See the links section at the bottom of this page. We take the red trail. |
We recorded audio several times during the trip. When we got home, we put it all together as the IslandCT podcast #53.
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| Map of the paddle trails close to Bear Island. This map comes from the NC Parks Hammocks Beach web site. See the links section at the bottom of this page. We take the red trail. |
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| Map of the Bear Island South East shore between the bath house area (BHA) and camp 11. This includes all the campsites on this side of the island except for the two group campsites just on the other side of the BHA. The areal photos where pasted together from google maps screen shots. The BHA area and canoe landing are circle in green. Each of the campsites is numbered and circled in read. The scale bars are in meters. |
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| The tides for this trip (one of the pages we laminated). |
The tide graphs we took with us were created with xtide and give the tides at Bogue Inlet. The people manning the front desk at the main park house said that the tides at the mainland dock came about 45 minutes later than those at Bogue Inlet. For arriving at the Island, we want to be taking an outgoing tide. For leaving, we want to be taking an incoming tide. But more import, we want to be paddling when the water is high enough that we don't have to drag the canoe too much. Also, we want to be early enough that we can delay our trip a bit if there is a storm going. Also, and more important than the tide, is the wind. But we don't have much control over that. On Jul-22, Sunday, we paddled out against the tide and it wasn't too bad. Mostly we didn't want to get caught in a storm.
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| p003(07-14 12:23) -- Arriving at kayak landing. |
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Pictures p015--p028 show the tarp being set up. All the pictures except the final one were taken by Kelly when she wasn't helping. The important concepts are as follows. The top must be relatively flat to allow the wind to go through unimpeded to keep us cool. The top must be high enough that the radiation from the tarp isn't too strong. The guy-lines must be numerous enough, positioned, and anchored well enough to withstand strong winds. The poles must be weighted so that the wind doesn't pick them up.
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| p015(07-17 07:39) -- The first step; setting up the center-line poles. In windy conditions, we lay out the poles, guy-lines, stakes, and sand bags in their approximate positions at the start. This minimizes the time between the start and the final strong setup. But this time, the wind wasn't too bad. So with no worries, the components were laid out as needed. |
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| p016(07-17 08:00) -- Getting the two main (center-line) poles and tarp in a free-standing position begins the critical time during which all can be blown away. |
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| p017(07-17 08:00) -- Getting the front poles ready. |
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| p018(07-17 08:01) -- Guy-line being attached to tarp at first front pole position. |
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| p019(07-17 08:01) -- First front pole going up. |
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| p020(07-17 08:03) -- The second front pole is up. The two guy-lines (front and side) are being attached. |
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| p021(07-17 08:04) -- It's front guy-line is being placed. |
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| p022(07-17 08:09) -- Guy-lines are being attached to the second rear pole. |
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| p023(07-17 08:09) -- The second rear pole is being guy-line is being placed. |
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| p024(07-17 08:13) -- Sand bags are being hung on poles. In windy conditions, this needs to be done as the poles go up. Here, we waited until the tarp was already up. |
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| p025(07-17 08:13) -- A sand bag is going up on a rear pole. |
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| p026(07-17 08:14) -- A sand bag is going up on a front pole. Yes, every pole really does need one. And in strong winds, they lift of the ground. |
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| p027(07-17 08:14) -- The sand bags are adjusted so that they are close to the ground without laying on it. This allows them to keep weight on the poles but also allows us to shove sand against them to stop them swinging. |
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| p028(07-17 08:16) -- See what I did. |
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| p032(07-17 21:13) -- Note the string of LEDs. This is a 3 meter string we purchased on Amazon. It's running off of three NiMH AA cells. They aren't quite strong enough to read but they are great for ambient light. They are really useful when searching for stuff because there are no strong shadows. Last year, we had some fun pink LEDs in the shape of dragon flies. Don't do this. Pink makes it impossible to see colors in nature field guides when we're trying to identify birds we saw during the day. Also, any fancy shape makes them too easy to tangle. The ones we have now feel like they use solid core wires. This would be great for art project where you want to give your LED string a shape and have the string keep that shape. For camping, it's not so great. Stranded wire would have been better to thread through the tent loops and wind up. |
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| p037(07-18 06:16) -- Morning breakfast routine. |
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Or did it start before p040?
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| p044(07-18 07:11) -- A blue crab with a broken claw and a missing claw. We didn't find as many blue crabs this year. The "blue crab" found at Bear Island and most of the USA East Coast: Species Callinectes sapidus, Wikipedia - Callinectes sapidus. |
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| p045(07-18 07:12) -- This one is a male. |
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| p049(07-18 07:21) -- The largest hermit crab we found on this trip. |
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| p053(07-18 07:23) -- It's a monster! |
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| p055(07-18 07:25) -- Huge colony of tiny hermit crabs. |
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| p064(07-18 07:31) -- A fish caught in an inter-tidal pool. Let us know if you recognize the species. |
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| p069(07-18 07:33) -- Beautiful! |
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| p087(07-18 08:01) -- Ghost crab (family Ocypodidae, subfamily Ocypodinae, Wikipedia - ghost crab ). |
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| p094(07-18 08:26) -- Moon snail (family Naticidae, wikipedia ). |
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| p105(07-18 10:06) -- Sand dollar (Phylum Echinodermata, order Clypeasteroida, Widipedia - sand dollar). |
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| p108(07-18 10:10) -- Loggerhead sea turtle nest. Loggerhead sea turtles: Family Cheloniidae, Species: Caretta caretta, Wikipedia - loggerhead sea turtle). en002 |
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| p109(07-18 10:21) -- Sea oats. Family Poaceae, Species Uniola paniculata. Wikipedia - Uniola paniculata. en001 |
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| p116(07-18 10:24) -- Ouch! |
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| p119(07-18 11:33) -- Willets. Family Scolopacidae, Species Tringa semipalmata. Wikipedia - willet. |
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| p130(07-18 18:38) -- Brown pelican. Family Pelicanidae, species Pelecanus occidentalis. Wikipedia - brown pelican. |
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| p149(07-19 08:32) -- A tiny fish with a white dot on its back. In an inter-tidal pool. His shadow is easier to see than he is. |
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| p150(07-19 08:32) -- Thumb for scale of picture p149. Couldn't get the hand close to the fish, too skittish. |
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| p151(07-19 08:32) -- It looks like sea lettuce, but red instead of green. Looking around the net: Maybe in the genus Halymenia? |
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Do as I say, not as I do. Journals are wonderful. I don't know why I keep a journal during some trips and not during others. Every trip for which I have a journal, it was worth every minute of writing. This time, I did keep a journal. Happy, happy : ) Here is page 34 with a diagram of our tent guy-line setup in preparation for the 22:00 storm.
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| Page 34 from the journal. |
The journal pages were about 15 x 24 cm. I scanned them at 15.5 x 24.5 cm. I like the smaller pages because it's nice to have a smaller notebook. Last year I had a zippered notebook holder. It worked really well but it was cloth - not rain proof. So before this trip, I coated it with tent seam silicone sealant. It worked really well on this trip. But we recently purchased a laminator. The pockets take 8.5x11 inch pages. We started laminating a few of our maps for the ARDF events. That was very cool. We could print pages to a smaller size and cut the laminated pages. But that would be a lot of work. Besides, maps, graphs, and tables are what we're most likely to laminate, and those are nice to have in a larger size. For the Bear Island trip, we laminated our tide chart, our sunrise/sunset table, and a couple other pages. It would have been really nice to have a notebook holder that could hold the laminated pages. So next year, we'll going for a full page notebook holder.
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| It's also handy to have a pocket notebook to take quick notes when the journal is inconvenient to use. |
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| Our maps for the road trips. On the way in, we used stop at Michaelangelo's for their subs. It was a tradition. But this time, we were passing by early and Kelly decide to make home-made subs. They were incredible : ) On the way out, we stop at the Dunkin' Doughnuts on Western Blvd, in Jacksonville. |
We used to use a spreadsheet to list everything we needed prepare for the trip. Mostly it was a packing list. It worked ok and was easy to setup. But this time, we wrote up our lists in text files. We designed a format which would make it easy to search for stuff, manually change it, and have scripts parse it and create a web page. It took a bit more time to setup, but Wow! What a change once it was running!
Here is how it worked. We would bring up two tmux panes, one with the text files and the other with the update scripts. After making a quick change in a text file to note something had been packed or making some other more extensive change, we would switch to the other tmux pane, up-arrow and enter to re-run the update script, and Voilà! We had it up on our home server. Very cool : ) Here is what it looked like just before leaving: Preparation and packing page . Having it up on the home server made it so we could check it from any computer in house. Even better: Using tmux made it so that we could also make changes from any computer in the house without closing the files on other computers.
This year, the lashing system to hold everything in the canoe was the best one we've ever used. It was fast because we had carabiners around the outer edge to clip the ropes in. It was nice and tight (unlike bungee) but still loose enough to slip things under a couple ropes to hold small items. It pretty much covered the entire central area of the canoe.
The one thing we still need to figure out is how to ensure the loops holding the biners to the sides of the canoe don't pull in under tension. These loops are the same ones we used last year and they are attached to the cross bars with clove hitches. It's mostly ok but one did pull inward during tightening. Maybe we can add an extra set of cross bars with loop attachment points at each end and attach these to the canoe's integral cross bars. Hum. We'll have to experiment.
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| Three ropes go on, on order from top to bottom. The first one, going along the outer edge doesn't hold anything down but it does help to keep things in. |
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Most of this stuff will go in a separate page but the most important stuff will go here.
| NC Parks Hammocks Beach State Park | The official website. |