Dawn at the tide pools.

What’s worth getting ourselves and our toddler up at 4:30am, driving half an hour, climbing over slippery rocks in the dark, with only one flashlight? A low, low tide at Cabrillo Beach Coastal Park.

Whenever someone comes to town who is new to the west coast, we like to take them to the tidepools at Cabrillo Beach in San Pedro. The setting is beautiful and jumping around on the rocks is super fun.  On top of that, Charlie, a frequent Aquarium goer, loves tidepool animals — especially Sea Anemones.   And, Papi’s new colleague at work, Dan, had never been to a tidepool, so when Papi discovered the tide would be a negative 1′4″ (which is very, very low), we had to take Dan and Charlie.

We got to the beach at 5:00am and headed out with our one flash light and sleepy baby in my arms.  It was dark. We started saying to each other, what possessed us to go to a tidepool in pitch darkness? But Papi, our fearless leader, was pretty good at finding interesting stuff with the flashlight and leading us to it.   When the sky started to lighten, we had made it out to the best part of the tidepools and the dawn light was beautiful.

Our first big find was the Brittle Star — or make that 4 Brittle Stars.  They are tiny, delicate little things that move amazingly fast.   Then it got exciting. We were all jumping from rock to rock, yelling out the names of various sea animals, and Charlie went from grumpy pants to excited explorer in a matter of minutes. She was soon walking on the giant rocks, finding animals herself, pointing them out and saying, “wanna touch it,” every few seconds.  Dan, Papi and I were super excited as well, watching the sun hit the tidepools and discovering new, and sometimes disgusting, animals all around us.  Like the fat, slimy, squishy Sea Hare.  (We knew it was some kind of slug-like creature but it wasn’t in our tidepool book so my friend who used to work at the Aquarium identified it for us later.) It was huge, slimy, brown and blubbery. And it had four antennae. We saw them everywhere. We saw Sea Anemones, Sea Urchins, various snails, Sea Stars, Mussels, and Sea Stars eating Mussels. Oh, and lots of Kelp and other sea weeds. Charlie had seen all of these creatures before, but never doing things like eating or moving. The looks on her face as she discovered new animals was priceless. It was a great day for us.

All the tidepool pics are here.