Jumbo polythene bags, anyone?

For the past couple of days I have been engaged in ordering various bits and pieces of equipment for my impending field season. The essential equipment of a marine biologist seems to consist of the most bizarre things, leading to my faintly bemused perusal of websites selling all manner of what can most accurately and precisely be described as "bits and bobs", ranging from Simply Scuba, gps4less, Millipore filters and Net Manufacturers UK (perhaps understandable) to Food Safety Direct, cheap-rope.uk, Lakeland Limited - The Home of Creative Kitchenware, Tooled-up and Forsport UK (?!?). Yesterday I spent something like an entire hour trying to find giant ziplock polythene bags (to collect pelagically spawned eggs and sperm in, in case anyone is wondering). Nobody makes them except for ZipLoc itself, which sells them for an exorbitant price. So I resort to regular jumbo polythene bags (from a packaging website) and then I spend another hour trying to figure out the best way to clip these shut in some sort of secure waterproof fashion. Options range from bits of string and clothes pegs to NASA quality Clip'n'Seal (sold only in the US of A) to some kind of miraculous one-handed plastic clip made in Sweden called Twixit that is mysteriously difficult to track down (in the end the home of creative kitchenware comes to the rescue).

Oh and of course not to forget the snazzy Durarite underwater paper and all-weather pens (writes underwater and upside down!). Expensive, but I couldn't resist and it is probably actually quite useful as unless I carry a giant plastic slate down (which is what we normally use underwater, with a pencil) I'll never get an hour's worth of observations down.

You know sometimes I think I ought to be spending a little more time thinking about Science. But then, intrepid and resourceful field biologists surely must know the ins and outs of standard UK polythene bag sizes. It's all part of the training, I'm sure...