Hello NCKA, it's been 12 years!

Our daughter asked me today to 'tell her a story about a sea creature' so I told her about an encounter with a sturgeon in SF Bay in 2008.....
That sent me down an NCKA nostalgiahole. Even remembered my password and logged in. Good to see so many familiar names doing so many familiar things. Missing the Norcal coast. We are still fishing and foraging - The Madness never leaves you.

I hope you are all well, and that the Gopher Rockfish finally has the respect it deserves.

NB

From BWE, a mathematician's take on the attack data, specifically on the paddle vs. pedal question:

Quote

As someone with a stats background (Ph.D. in Sociology with a quantitative focus, M.A. in Demography), I would agree that there is nothing here that suggests any conclusive "statistically significant" differences by propulsion method.

The OP is correct that you would really need to know how many people are out there in these types of kayaks at risk of getting attacked to do the analysis correctly.

In fact, you would ideally need to know not only what kind of kayaks are out there in consumers' hands, but how much they use them. In other words, if you had 1000 people with Hobie mirage kayaks and 1000 people with paddle kayaks, and the mirage drive kayakers spend twice as much time on the water as people with paddle kayaks, you would expect them to experience twice as the number of shark attacks even if the rate of shark attacks was exactly the same.

I'm not so sure about that. Statistics is an exact science, but the design and interpretation of statistical tests is not.

There are a lot of factors to be considered in the latter - the importance of those depends on the strength of the effect - to give a simplistic example - if the 12 attacks had all been on Hobies, then I don't think anyone would be worrying about whether hobies spend more time on the water or what colour they were.

However, as it is, the descriptive statistics available are indeed pretty muddled (I had not seen those before, they are very informative) and thus the small sample size is a problem, as are the other, potentially confounding, factors like the number of Hobies vs paddle etc. Hopefully not a 'problem' that will be fixed anytime soon.

NB

Blimey. Glad you're OK Ryan. Glad you got back in land despite so many holes in yr boat.

A Twinkie. What is that?

I was walking on a trail in the redwoods a couple years ago and I noticed that every time I saw a specific largish, white mushroom, it had been smashed by someone. It was a white, skirted, gilled mushroom, around 5-6 inches tall. I wondered if it was deliberate by a ranger because of toxicity.

Sounds like Destroying Angel - all white? Very very nasty

We used to get them at a place down the San Mateo coast while shore fishing for rockfish. A spanish friend pointed them out and could not believe that they were so abundant and that no-one was eating them. They were pretty good, steamed and dunked in butter.

Amazing photos. Well done NCKA.

Send Alan Tani a pm, he's spent a lot of time thinking about it. He's a bit far south to act as your mothership but has some good ideas.