Always something new - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 240

My previous expeditions to the Gulf of California were of immense
help in determining the live exhibits, selecting the species to be fea-
tured, and, eventually, collecting the animals. The husbandry sta¤ and
exhibit designers worked for a year and a half to design the exhibit. It
also took a year to receive word, through the American embassy in Mex-
ico City, that a collecting permit had been issued to us by the Mexi-
can government.
Our plan was to collect our animals at Los Frailes, near the tip of
Baja California. This was the same place where Bob Kiwala, Kelly Mc-
Colloch, and I had tried to collect back in 1968, when our plans were
disrupted by the unexpected storm. Chuck Farwell had made a col-
lection there in 1978 for the Scripps Aquarium, and I'd driven down
from Steinhart to join him. So I knew the place fairly well.
This time our exhibit would be relatively small, so we wouldn't need
the large, floating receivers or the numbers of fish that Sea World had
required for their large fifty-thousand-gallon exhibit. Nor would we
need to transport the fish back to the States in holding tanks in a large
boat. We planned to fly most of our animals out in Styrofoam boxes
to San Francisco from the recently completed jet airport at San José
del Cabo, not too many miles from our collecting site at Los Frailes—
itself still accessible only by a dirt road. We would camp on the beach
and anchor our small receivers just o¤shore. Although most of the an-
imals we needed could be collected at Los Frailes, the returning trucks
would stop on the way north at Bahía de la Concepción and Bahía de
Los Angeles for finespotted jawfish, sea fans, and other invertebrates.
Chuck Farwell and the aquarium's new collector, John O'Sullivan
(Bob Kiwala had left the aquarium to return to Rarotonga), worked
out the logistics of the expedition and made seemingly endless lists of
all the equipment we'd need. Not only did we have to deal with the
usual problems of collecting, holding, and shipping the animals, but
we had the additional challenge of living on the beach. Conditions
would be very primitive—no electricity, no fresh water, no toilets—
and we'd have to bring almost everything we needed with us.
Because of the intense sun, shade for protection from sunburn was
at the top of our list. Two large tarpaulins lashed together and secured
by guy lines to plywood sand anchors would be set up over the propane-