Tide pool

It's been so long since we were at the tide pools, especially during low tide at 8am.  Actually, we've never been to the tide pools that early before!  A friend of mine was going to take her kids and invited us since they had never been.

It was a bit of a wake-up call for me, but so worth it!

 Didn't take long for the boys to start picking things up:

Looks like most photos from here on out will be with our mask on :-\

There.... much better!  Perhaps a mask "beard" will suffice :-)

Sea anemones are pretty common in tide pools, although I never knew that they could live out of the water:

We found our friends! She definitely had her hands full and I forgot to mention about wearing regular shoes vs flip-flops!

We also saw a few people foraging for mussels, as you can see a couple people doing that in the photo above.  There are lots of the mussels on the banks of the pools:

These people were walking back to shore with bags and bags of them! Graham picked up his one.  I doubt if he will eat it but he wanted to keep it??!

Thankfully he dropped it along the way and lost it. Phew!

No one attempted to catch the big crab:

 Graham is always so far ahead of everyone:

Graham in his element.  He really has a knack for walking and hopping along on these rocks:

My two monkeys:

No, wait... here are my two monkeys!

Some more interesting things along the way.  These look like mini-volcano corals but not sure if they are dead or alive?

We see our first wild starfish!!!  Well, Graham has actually seen one before with Bobby at another tide pool a couple of years ago, but this is my first:

I actually saw a guy pick up the starfish and plopped it into his bucket for his family to see.  He was walking away with it and I'm not sure if his subconscious told him to put it back into the tidepool, but I'm glad he did!  He probably realized I had seen him picking it out of the water.

Supposedly the starfish population is really struggling so I'm glad this one is back in the water. Yay!

I believe this little pink thing is some sort of live coral:

And yes, it's super tiny!  Charlie said it was "squishy" :-)

Of course we had to climb up these big rocks to get back to the car... instead of just walking along the shore:

Interesting looking pattern on a rock.  I should have brought this one home :-P

There was a production crew filming something near the tidepools.  This is SO California.  Ha ha!

Garbage truck!!!  Graham got so excited and basically watched the garbage truck from the one end of the street to the dead end:

Talk about a view!

A fun day at the tidepools! I'm so glad my friend dragged me out of bed :-)

Hopefully the State will not shut these parks down again.  The number of new Coronavirus cases are currently skyrocketing.  Restaurant dine-in services are shut down again although now they can offer outdoor seating as an option?  Hmm... we had yet to venture out and sit down at a restaurant.  At this point, I think we'd rather just do take-outs instead.