Bay Adventure

I had an adventure the other day. It was great.

Joel Thomas, who I work with at camp, has an amazing salt-water aquarium in which he keeps various specimens collected from the local bays. The aquarium serves two purposes; First, it is an educational tool for the various groups that come through camp. Kids and adults alike walk through the greeting area next to the camp's front office and stare for long periods of time at all the little creatures and plants that wave gently in the current of the water. Secondly, the tank serves as a hobby (or second job) for Joel. These two reasons for the tank may not necessarily be in the right order.

I love having Joel around because he brings a lot of childlike enthusiasm to our job. He also has a way of sparking that enthusiasm in me. It's fun to see how excited he gets about simply exploring creation, trying new things, getting wet and muddy, and just playing in nature. Needless to say, Joel and I could get ourselves in a lot of trouble some day;)

In order to make his aquarium both practical and educational, Joel acquired a "take permit" from the state that allows him to collect specimens from the tide pools, beaches, and bays along the coast. I have watched him over the last several months build his aquarium up to a wonderful exhibit of native marine activity. Unfortunately, I had not been able to go out gathering with him, even though much of his collection comes from the tides pools at the Three Graces just down the road from camp. Until Saturday.

Joel decided to expand his exhibit by creating a touch-tank system that is portable enough to take to schools so he can do assemblies and such. I could go into more depth about that, but I won't now. The important information is that he needed some new creatures to put in his touch tank and we happened to both have the day off, so he asked me to go with him. How could I resist an opportunity to act like an over-grown kid and go play in the mud?!

We went collecting in Netart's Bay, east of Tillamook, because it is home to some very impressive sand dollar beds, several types of clams, and the infamous moon snail. All of which, Joel specifically wanted to have for his touch tanks. We took two sea kayaks out just before low tide (about 8:30 am). The unfortunate part about our situation was that in order to his the clam beds at low tide, we had to paddle from the boat launch against the out-going tide, and paddle back against the incoming tide. I have a new respect for motor boats now, but at least we got a good workout.

I think I could go on and on about all the little things that happened after we got out to the mud flats where all the creatures live, but there's too much, so I am just going to give the most exciting parts. First, we were happy to find that cockles are extremely easy to dig, if you are in the right spot. We raked through beds of eel grass and came out with handfuls of cockles that were only just below the surface. Of course the best part of this was probably just getting to play in the mud, but it didn't hurt that we found what we were looking for. We also, however, found much more than we were looking for.

As a was raking through the mud at one point, I felt what I thought was a cockle. But as I dug at it more, I realized that it was much bigger than that. To my surprise, I pulled out about a 4" dungeness crab! To beat that, I realized there was a second larger one buried along with it! When i pulled this second one up, it was obviously close to legal harvesting size. Of course, in all my excitement I let my fingers get a little too close to the front end of the crab. Let's just say I won't be making that mistake again. I'll let the picture below serve as a description of what happened next.

I got the last laugh, though. Crab makes an excellent Easter dinner.

We weren't able to safely take a camera with us on the outing, but I did take some pictures of our catch back at camp in the aquariums. So enjoy the results of boys being boys:)

This is a live sand dollar.

I used to think sand dollars were rare, but there were areas in the sand dollar beds where we could not take a step without stepping on them. They're fascinating creatures.

These are two giant oysters. I wish the picture showed the scale better, but these are about 12 inches tall.

These are my favorite things in the tank. They're called nudebranks (nude-e-brank), and they're are basically a sea slug. But they have really cool opalescent coloring.

These ugly things are the moon snails we found. They drill through clam shells and suck the guts out of them. What I'm amazed by is that they can fit all their gooyness back into their shells which seem disproportionately small.