Star Quality

Sunflower Seastar

Slightly out of focus, but still fun: the effect of surge on a point-and-shoot camera.

Arms like tentacles.  

A fuller view of the sunflower seastar.

Tomales Bay: Night-Paddle

Kayaks ready for the excursion.

You can never have too many of these, right?

Launched into the bay; the pause before the paddling begins.

We went paddling to see the bioluminescence of the dinoflagellates, the planktonic fireflies of the bay here, as well as the vast array of the starry, starry night, neither of which proved to be photographical (by my hands, anyway).  I would have liked to document the sea-glitter clinging to paddle and gloves in the water and even lifted out of the water.

Conditions: no swell, no chop, so calm waters; hardly any breeze at all; chilly temperatures to be met with wool and fleece and excitement at being on that water and beneath those stars.

Byron: "Between Two Worlds Life Hovers . . ."

Between two worlds life hovers like a star

'Twixt night and morn upon the horizon's verge,

How little do we know that which we are!

How less what we may be! The eternal surge

Of time and tide rolls on and bears afar

Our bubbles. As the old burst, new emerge,

Lashed from the foam of ages; while the graves

Of empires heave but like some passing waves.

--Lord Byron's last stanza to Canto XV of his incomparable Don Juan