Tide Pools–Day 2

The first morning in Hawaii, we were up bright and early!  It helped that the time was three hours earlier there than in Seattle.  The tide was going to be lowest early in the morning, so we headed out to some tide pools.  This location is really neat because it is a outcropping of lava that flowed into the ocean thousands of years ago.  There is a whole line of tide pools that are separated from the ocean during low tide (though as the waves crash against the rocks, sometimes water does get into them).  I assume as the tide comes up, almost every wave crashes through these pools.  These seem a little unusual as tide pools in that there is a shelf right next to them that goes into fairly deep ocean.

This is one of the larger tide pools…there were quite a few.  It was very windy that morning and the waves were really crashing against the shelf there and even though it was low tide some of the waves crashed over a bit.

This is higher up on the outcropping.  All the rocks are razor sharp and there isn’t much growing there.  Even though it was windy and sprinkling, we got a rainbow to go with it!

Scott and I down at the tide pools.

The tide pools were pretty fun!  Overall, we didn’t see as many invertebrates as we would have liked (actually, we saw relatively few invertebrates on the whole trip).  We did see one crab and lots of these pretty pink urchins.  The are about the size of a lemon and were stuffed in every nook and cranny.

The most fun thing about the tide pools is that they seemed to be a nursery for fish.  There were lots of baby fish along with some very pretty algaes.  Oh, and the picture of the urchins and these fish were taken with our underwater camera.  It was relatively inexpensive and did a great job of taking pictures underwater.  I am so glad we bought it!!!

There was a bit of a hike on a path to get out to this outcropping that the tide pools were on.  After hanging out there for a while, we headed back and the sun finally came out!  It was a nice hike and there were beautiful views along the way.  One of my favorites is this picture.  You can see just how clear and beautiful the water is there.