Bivalves

Scaphopods

I wasn't finding anything great so I wandered around the flats. After a few minutes I notices a small brown/black chunk sticking out. I knew this could either be a piece of wood or bone. I sat down with my chisel and worked my way around it. The mudstone fell away from what turned out to be bone and after 10 minutes I popped it out. Curt thought it looked like the condial part of a skull.

Carol, Deborah, Curt and I decided to head south a mile or so to an area that has produces several species of crabs. We didn't find much on our journey but it was a nice walk. We decided to check in on Andy to see what progress he's made on the rock. The diet Andy put the whale on got it down to 200 lbs but it was still too heavy. They tried to drag it on a rubber mat but made little progress in the loose sand. We decided to leave it for another day but Joe wanted to try one more thing. While we waited I popped a few concretions in the area and found one with 3 small vertebra, possibly from a pinniped.

Joe returned with 2 long drift wood tree limbs and wrapped the rubber mat around them to make a gurney. By golly it worked and we soon had a man on each corner and where making progress back to the trucks. It was still a heavy load for 4 people and after several rest stops we made the quarter mile back to the vehicles.

It was getting late and we all loaded up and headed home. Home for Deborah and I this weekend was a nearby hotel. With such great weather we decided to say the night and do more collecting on Sunday.

I woke up early Sunday and I was pretty sore from head to toe. My previously broken ankle and injured knee where swollen. My back and shoulders hurt from a loaded down backpack the day before and I had a few other aches and pains but nothing to stop me from doing it all over again.

We made it back to the beach around 9:00 am but the tide was too high to access the area we collected on Saturday. We poked around for a couple of hours and found a few bone fragments and 3 or 4 agates. As the tide receded we made our way closer and closer to the location. It sure seemed like there was more sand on the beach from the previous day and in some areas at least a foot of sand was deposited over the course of the night. Usually in the winter the sand is scoured off the beach only to be re-deposited in the summer. Could this mild weather and lack of any strong storms this winter be the cause for so much sand? Even so I didn't think it could be piled back on the beach so quickly. A sand bar formed about 20 foot off shore from where I found the skull the day before creating a pool of water 2 foot deep with a layer of sand on the bottom where I dug out the skull. Wow, how quickly things changed.

We collected for another hour and I finally happed upon a nice Pectin specimen. Unfortunately I left my chisel in the truck and when I tried to pick it out with my rock pick I could see that it wanted to fragment. I gave it a good coat of Vinac to help stabilize it and left it for someone else.

Trip Participants: Carol, Curt, Andy, Bill, Joe, Deborah, and Andrew