Gunkholing in the CA Delta

[yzer]

We anchored out for four days in the California Delta last week. Typically, gunkholing is our main boating activity. This was a particularly good trip. The holiday weekend crowd was gone, the temperature was reasonable with highs in the 90's, the wind was light and a nice moon filled the night sky.

We had one incident at the beginning of the trip. The old Chrysler Crown Marine M-7 started to miss after we were 15 minutes from the slip. I brought the boat back to the berth at a crawl and set set about to fix the problem. Fuel OK, points OK, ignition wires and terminals OK. Spark at the plugs OK. It turned out that the problem was two loose spark plug terminal contacts. Those things have an uncanny way of unscrewing themselves after a lot of heat cycles. I changed out all six plugs anyway just to be on the safe side as the plugs had been in use for three years. An hour later we were back on the water.

Peace, quiet and time to enjoy the sights and sounds of the estuary are the goals of gunkholing. We explore the vicinity and get some exercise with inflatable row boats. There are plenty of birds to watch.

We had a nice thunderstorm at dusk on Friday.

[yzer]

No need to be afraid of the word gunkhole. It's been in common boater usage as long as I can remember.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunkholing

[coelacanth2]

Nice lightning shot. I see you have very few egrets about your trip...

[Thorne]

Very nice! I spent a lot of time (several months) aboard my SJ21 in Railroad Cut behind Locke, plus exploring the upper Delta and particularly the Moke. Love it.

[yzer]

Nice lightning shot. I see you have very few egrets about your trip...

We have no egrets about the trip. We were heron from plenty of other birds as well, but no unusual spottings. These photos are frame captures from a pocket video cam. That's how I managed to get the lightning shot. I have this feeling that I took one very good shot of an egret with a 400mm lens but I haven't developed that yet. Yes, I'm still shooting 35mm film.

Railroad Cut and the Meadows is a beautiful area but we haven't been there for a while. We may be heading into Cache Slough late in the month.

[coelacanth2]

Could you use a Yashica dedicated close-up camera with a ring flash? I switched to digital, got no use for it.
I'm keeping the early '60s Zeiss though. Gotta find someplace to clean it out and give it a tuneup, though.

[yzer]

The Yashica w/ring flash sounds like a nice combination but I doubt I would have much use for it. I'm keeping the Nikon FM2n for a while. It's a darned near indestructible mechanical SLR and shoots without batteries if necessary. I'll eventually want a new Nikon digital body and keep the old Nikon/Nikkor AI lenses for it.