I did not get a chance to post yesterday, but I'm going to try to do two posts today. So let's get started!
Yesterday I woke up before anyone else around 5:30 in the morning. We were told we had to be up by 8 and that we would be leaving around 9. So I was awake very early. Because I had slept outside on the patio the night before, I had my sleeping bag, Cocoon blanket, and sleeping pad outside with me. So I decided to carefully put my stuff in the connecting room that connects the room the girls were using, to the one the guys were using. But I had to do this carefully, because although the doors were closed, the sound travels very well and I didn't want to wake anyone up.
So after successfully accomplishing that task, I wanted some food. So I went downstairs and into the kitchen for breakfast. After searching through every cabinet I could find, I found a bowl. But I couldn't find any spoons for cereal. So I had started to give up when I realized that the islands in the middle of the room had labeled drawers as well. And I found spoons. So I ate some cereal and I started talking to this lady named Emily. She is from Sussex and has an accent that has somewhat become Americanized. She is a horticulturist and is doing some research on desert plants. We started talking about other places she has gone to which included Kenya in Africa. That really got my attention, but by that point, she had already finished making her breakfast and left.
After everyone woke up, several hours later, and had somehow managed to eat and get ready for the day ahead of us, we headed out to the mud flats at Choya Bay (That's how it's spelled despite the fact that they have a street sign that is Cholla Drive). I was interested in knowing what we would be seeing out there during low tide.
Now because the bay is so long and shallow, when the water recedes, it REALLY recedes. So we get out of the car, take a picture or two, and put on our scuba boots (we needed them because the rocks we would be climbing over can have barnacles which could cut up our feet. Well... that and the countless shells we walked on.) When we got there I was stunned.
When we had first started walking out on the mud flats I wasn't really paying much attention to the ground as much as the creatures we found along the way. But one of the times that we stopped to look at a crab, I glanced at the ground to see if there might be another crab around when I finally saw it. I had noticed the countless little spiral shells when we first started out, they were no more than an inch apart from each other and littered the ground. But what I saw now was different. Behind every shell was a line. A line in the sand. They were moving. And it wasn't just that they had moved before the tide went out, the water would have covered the tracks, but now the water was gone and the tracks were staying out in the open for all to see. And I had completely missed it. Now that I had started to notice that, I noticed that every once in a while, the shells would move a step forward. So not only were they moving, but they were still alive. And I felt guilty about the countless shells I had stepped on.
As we moved closer the the ocean and away from the shore we started finding larger animals. We found Fiddler Crabs and Blue Crabs. Then as the tide was coming back in we found one octopus, then another. They were smaller than my fist but when they got scared they would ink and try to get away, but they weren't very successful. Not because of lack of effort, but because we knew the direction it was going and quickly found it again.
After taking a solid number of pictures, we started heading back to the shore. We finally ended up back by the car and we took off our sandy shoes and put them in a bucket so we could clean them off once we got back to CEDO. We headed off and once we got back to CEDO we had an hour and a half free before our lecture would begin.
Our lecture was brought to us by Abraham who works at CEDO and who we met yesterday. He talked about the natural history of CEDO and some of the marine life that lives in the area. After his lecture we had a lecture on tides provided by Dr. C. Then we went out to dinner at Mary's. After Mary's we came back and went to go scorpion hunting, but the black light gave me a headache so I went back and started making my bed. A few good laughs later, with a smile on my face from talking to my mom, I curled up and watched the ocean before falling asleep.
And now it's Thursday and we are going to head out for our next adventure at 9. i can't wait to see what's next.
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