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I just got back from a trip to the Big Island of Hawaii where I fully intended to do a lot of dawn and dusk bubbling -- dawn and dusk because the Waikoloa area were staying is on the 'dry' side of the island. The humidity is reliable good (60% to 80%) around dawn. Unfortunately, when the humidity is up -- so is the wind. I was up before sunrise almost every day -- and the wind was rarely less than 7-10 miles an hour, and was very turbulent. Although, I didn't end up doing much bubbling, I learned a few things.

In order to travel light, I brought dry ingredients and some Dawn Pro with me but not any readymade bubble juice. I brought a small scale and the measuring cup and spoons that I use on the rare occasions that I mix up a batch by volume. (The guar-based recipe that I often use is pretty forgiving and has proven to be reliable even when measuring ingredients by volume).

The biggest lesson that I learned is that when mixing polymers, the size and shape of the mixing vessels is more important than I had realized.

Since first publishing the guar-based recipe that was developed by a few of us together, I have periodically received messages from people having trouble with their guar clumping when following the basic recipe. Since, I never experience clumping, I have tended to treat the clumping issue to be either an issue of mixing up much larger batches than I do or a failure to fully follow the directions (which involve using near boiling water).

While I brought a plastic measuring cup from home, I left the pyrex measuring cups in which I do my mixing at home as they are heavy and breakable. I assumed that the condo where we would be staying would have something suitable.

What I didn't realize was how much my mixing relied on the size and shape of the pyrex measuring cups in which I do my mixing.

My first attempt used a large and reasonably deep soup/cereal bowl. I followed my normal method and lo-and-behold there was terrible clumping. I suspect that the problem was that the bowl was too broad to get a vortex going by hand that was large enough to handle the guar. Trial 2 involved a tall glass. This also failed -- I think that it was probably too narrow and deep.

After some trial-and-error, I found a method that worked pretty well with the cereal/soup bowl (which involved sprinkling a guar/salt mixture as I stirred vigorously)., but there were some clumps and it was much more of a hassle than my usual method (where dumping the guar/salt mix into vigorously stirred water results in a virtually clumpless mix). There weren't any well-stocked stores nearby to pickup sufficiently dry isopropyl (90% or better) or glycerine that could have been used to make a slurry.

Given the difficult bubbling conditions, the garland wand and a small (21" top-string) tri-string were the only wands that got much use. The bubbles did not last as long as I would have expected -- with humidity and wind comparable to what I have to contend with on summer evenings. I don't know if this was due to environmental conditions (Waikoloa has a lot of exposed lava rock and grit) or if maybe the difference in water contributed. If I had more time, I would have compared tap to bottle water or distilled water/tap combinations. But, I was there to have fun with my family and tinker with bubbleology

I wish that I had brought my pH meter. I am curious if the pH played a role in the subpar performance of the clumping issues.

As disappointed as I was in the performance, my 4 year-old son had a lot of fun chasing bubbles at sunrise and our upstairs condo neighbors had a lot of fun watching -- they approached me on the beach a few days later to say that they had never seen anything like it -- and refused to believe that those were mediocre bubbles.

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