Alexa was anxious to get back down to the beach, it was perfect timing with Low tide around 11 am. Here you see Alexa and behind her is an injured elephant seal that had come ashore.
Someone from the institute was watching over it and eventually a rescue team from Laguna Beach came an hauled it off in a huge "dog carrier." I helped carry it up to the truck and it was quite heavy even with 4 people lifting the carrier.
We then headed down to the tide pools. Alexa is holding a small hermit crab, there were plenty of them, you just had to look for the snail shells that were moving faster than the others.
We found some good sized starfish as well.
Alexa found that she could stick the chiton to her face and they would suck on. We replaced them nicely back on the rocks :)
After a quick shopping stop to get some beach clothes, we went to Salt Creek. It is a great surfing beach and has nice soft sand. In the picture below you may be able to see Alexa behind the surfer. She is chasing sea gulls.
Grandpa was trying hard to reproduce a picture he has of Jeff on the wall at home. I was surprised to find that I got pretty close with this shot of Alexa playing with the kelp floating in the water.
Here is the sand castle we built, even with abridge across the moat. We tried to fill the moat, but the water just kept sinking into the sand.
This is a gea picture of me and Alexa at Salt Creek, just before we left.
