SoCal meeting

[monty]

very nano-tonmocon

Well, I managed to rendezvous with marinebio_guy, but we didn't get any of the "maybes" to show... I did flip a lot of rocks at the tidepools, though, and we collected some food for MBG's bimacs... the tidepools weren't all that exciting unless you really like hermits, snails, limpets, and chitons. But even boring tidepools are still pretty fun... we stuck with the plan and went to the Aquarium of the Pacific, where there were some octopuses... mostly hiding except the juvenile female GPO, who was quite active, but that made it crowded around her tank, too. I didn't want to flash her (although she didn't seem annoyed that others were...) so all my long-exposure pics came out very blurry... however, here are a few shots of me and MBG:





All in all, a fun time, but a bit sad that we couldn't manage to round up a bigger group... but we're hoping for a "next time"!

 

[DWhatley]

I was hoping for more pictures since I have never even been to CA or touched the Pacific Ocean (I have done two dives in the Bay of Bandaras though). We thought about it during one trip to put a foot in the Pacific but we were not up to 300 mile round trip just to say we had truly driven across the country.

 

[tonmo]

Great pics, thanks for sharing!

 

[monty]

I was hoping for more pictures since I have never even been to CA or touched the Pacific Ocean (I have done two dives in the Bay of Bandaras though). We thought about it during one trip to put a foot in the Pacific but we were not up to 300 mile round trip just to say we had truly driven across the country.

I'm afraid I was rather lax in that sort of thing, but here's a scenery shot from the tidepools:



the aquarium itself was so crowded I didn't get any decent octopus or seahorse/see dragon pics, but there is a pic of a bonnet shark:

 

[DWhatley]

Monty,
The tidal pool pic shows someone else mucking about. What do other people collect in the pools?

 

[PurpleTentacle]

Yeah, sorry about that. I was on call on weekend and couldn't leave the area. We just printed 12,800 pages over the weekend for our grant renewal application. Amazingly, nothing broke during the process.

 

[marinebio_guy]

Next time we might try to have it closer to S.D. so that its not as far as a drive for the people down there.

 

[monty]

Monty,
The tidal pool pic shows someone else mucking about. What do other people collect in the pools?

Legally, no one is supposed to collect anything without a permit (which marinebio_guy has) so hopefully they weren't collecting anything. But they seemed to be enjoying showing each other starfish they'd pulled off the rocks (I hope they didn't force them, since that can hurt their tube feet, but I was mostly asking marinebio_guy about his research, so I didn't really interact with the other folks at the tidepools.)

These pools had a different topography than the ones I've played about in in northern California and other areas, there's a very large, very flat expanse with a lot of rocks, so it didn't seem to have the wide range of "how much of the time is this covered by water" micro-habitats; it looked like it's all one big zone that's either underwater or exposed (although we did go out a bit to the next zone, where there were more anemones, some sort of sea hare, and more urchins, but also more danger of getting my camera and cell phone soaked by a wave and a lot less of the octo-food that MBG wanted to collect...) At least on Sunday, which had relatively light surf, it seemed like wading with a mask, snorkel, gloves, and booties might work without too much getting pounded by waves or not being able to see in the foam. Maybe I'll try that sometime...

 

[erich orser]

How close is this to the wreck of the Dominator?