Find the Crab

Can you see the crab in the photo?

Too easy?  In the comfort of your home, perhaps.  While swimming about and trying to pay attention to everything, it can be surprising what a person may miss.  Here, I was happy to spot the crab right away, for down in Monterey I'd started to pick up a decorator crab thinking that it was a piece of trash; I dropped it before it could pinch my fingers.  This creature is fairly well camouflaged, but not so decorated as that other one.

Here's the close-up.

Abalone Cove

"Secret Cove"

The entrances to the cove on an energetic day.  The southwest swell had mellowed and some rock formations shielded the approach.

Heading in.

Inside and looking back out.

Beached: the tide had dropped enough for a landing.  Often, I've arrived with no beach at all.

The current pulling outward with the receding wave.

The view of beach's end.  Substantial log there.

Looking upward from that beach: amphitheatre style, but no easy way upward.

Checking my own exit.

The arches again.

Heading out.

Not A Pretty Sport II

Weeds and surface scum from taking photos neck deep (or deeper) into the tide-flow.  The sweater worked like a filter, and I was square in the current, so I caught quite a bit.  At one point I was distinctly festooned--not a word I use lightly--with sea grass and kelp.

My James Bond persona: 008.  

(I made and carried a business card in the fourth grade that identified me as British Secret Service Agent 008; I little thought how a business card did not quite fit the secret agent persona, and yet how "secret" was Bond, James Bond, about his identity?  My foolishness was cultural and of the day, I'd say.)