Friday, August 23, 2013

Day 6.225: Wild at the beach

I'm finally getting round to the photos (other than iPhone pictures) of our trip - sorry if you're already tired of hearing about it.

Our trip to the National Seashore on the Atlantic side of the Cape had the excitement of a sign about great white sharks. The warning: don't swim with seals. Our experience: seals everywhere just off the beach (but very nice to see).


We also saw cormorants, but no sharks.

We were probably in more danger when I decided to catch a huge crab in a small net on bay side of the island.  After we'd looked at it, I tried to let it go but one of its barbed legs was caught in the net.  I tried to free it with my fingers, it tried to cut itself free with its large claws.  Eventually, it left me to untangle it without too much fear of losing a finger and it immediately buried itself in the sand.  We saw several of these crabs do that - they are extremely efficient, just reversing in without more than a small vibration visible.

Even more amazing was to see a live horsehoe crab buried in the sand - no danger from that or the sea snails leaving impressive trails in the beds of the shallow pools.



Know what else is wild?  How far the tide goes out there.  Here's a picture from when we arrived a couple of hours after high tide followed by two from around low tide.


The middle one is looking back towards the beach pictured in the first one - and we were nowhere near as far out as we could have gone!

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