We arrived to find the tide WAAAAAY out...far enough that you could walk under the ferry docks quite a distance, where we found some soft corals and starfish clinging to the walls. One of the divers from the underwater park (yes, that's what they call that dive area) came back to shore with a unique find...he had found a tiny octopus. It's hard to get a perspective on this, but this is a one-gallon bucket, and this octopus was about the size of a marshmallow. He was SOOOOO cute!
We walked along the beach, looking at shells, dead crabs, seaweed, and finding lots of weird rubbery things in the water. I didn't know what it was and to me it looked like garbage. Most of them were much more grey--almost black. Later, after I got home, I found out that these are the egg casings for the moon snails. The snails sit in the sand and squirt out this mucus which mixes with sand and sandwiches the eggs inside. The sand in this area was quite dark, so logically the egg casings were darker (this is a borrowed photo from the internet). The beaches were littered with these things. I suspect there will be a booming population of these things in future years.
We walked further along and eventually found some clams--a couple of really big ones. I picked one up, thinking it was an empty shell and it squirted at me, which surprised me. I also found one live moon snail. These things are dang cool! This thing was bigger than a softball and weighed a couple pounds. I found directions online that tell you how to remove the snail from the shell by boiling it or simply cutting it out, but it also said that they aren't very good eating. Edible, yes, but not that good...kinda tough. I didn't want to take the snail just to kill it for the shell, so I put him back. His foot was all folded up and he was tucked back into the shell a bit, but I put him back into the little pool of water that I found him in so he could go live out his snaily days eating clams and whatnot.
Ben found the starfish fascinating and we picked up a few off the sand to look at them more closely, pointing out to the girls where their mouth is. Starfish are particularly odd--you think they're going to be all mushy and floppy like gummy worms, but they're really quite rigid and rough.
We stayed for an hour or so and the tide began to creep back in, and our stomachs began to let us know it was time for some lunch. We collected our treasures and headed up to a pizza place and had lunch. Back at the house, they jumped on the trampoline, then walked down to the park to play for a bit and it rained on them a bunch while they climbed the trees. They came back to the house, toweled off and had some hot chocolate and watched "Megamind." At about 4:00, Miss G was picked up by her mom and we walked the twins back to their house, which I didn't realize was so close--about five blocks away. On our way back, Cammie and I found a dozens of snails creeping across the sidewalk. I hadn't seen many snails in the first 20 years of living here, and now I see them everywhere. The one on the left was one of the bigger ones, about the size of a quarter, but we saw dozens of little baby ones, smaller than my pinky nail. There are two different species, I've learned--the brown lipped snail and the white lipped snail. They were all hanging out together, so part of me thinks that it's merely a recessive trait or something.
Hope you all have a safe and festive 4th of July!
I saw that little octopuss' cousin in a restaurant last month. The beach is so much fun. That egg casing looks like plastic. Strange world we live in. Cheers!
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