When: July 2019
Where: Rosario Beach at Deception Pass State Park
With: solo
What: tidepooling
Accompaniment: Day In, Day Out by JR JR
My husband’s job gets intense at the fiscal year, and can’t take time off in June and July. Trying to pay better attention to my body to avoid burnout, I realized I needed a break, and decided to take a staycation on my own.
I heard the tides were much lower than usual, so I made my first day trip a solo adventure up to Deception Pass where there was tidepooling. Growing up on the California coast, we used to tidepool pretty regularly, but I haven’t gone much since moving to Washington.
Late morning, after a dull drive up I-5, I pulled in to Rosario Beach. Gorgeous oceanspray in full bloom filled the understory beneath Douglas-firs with white dangling bundles of flowers. I love to see masses of native plants all in bloom at once — a visual feast — and this was the best display of oceanspray I’ve ever seen.
A yellow rope marked a route through the tidepool, to keep visitors from trampling all over the fragile habitat as they’d done in previous years. The wet rock was a little slippery, so I was cautious about my dSLR, hugging the lens to myself and holding my other hand out to brace myself. I still have a small scar on my knuckle from sacrificing my hand to protect my point and shoot camera from a rocky beach tumble in college.
An older woman served as a volunteer docent, flagging me over to show me a giant chiton, barely discernable from the rock it was plastered against and bigger than my hand. Beneath a nearby boulder, sea anemones and bright red sea slugs took shelter. I lingered by a rock encrusted with barnacles, taking photos, as an intact purply-red crab carapace beside the rock shocked child after child who came around the corner, before they realized it wasn’t alive. Photographing seaweed hanging from the black jagged rocks, I spotted a thumb-length green isopod the exact hue of the seaweed in sunlight. Weird but cool — quintessential ocean life!
I followed the rocky path through the tidepools, then ate my sandwich on a log on the beach. The crowds of kids cleared out while I ate, and a laminated tidepool species identification card was available, so I decided I hadn’t had my fill and took a second pass for more photography and learning what I was seeing. Every few minutes, a jet roared overhead from the nearby naval air station.
Usually I keep to myself, but I sat and chatted with the docent at a picnic table overlooking the beach for fifteen minutes before moving on to my next activity, ducking through a shady tunnel of oceanspray to see the expansive view of the Puget Sound from high-up, grass-topped Rosario Head.
