Uncruise Adventure Day Two

 On Monday our big adventure was tide pooling along the shore of an island, I can't remember the name of this area....sorry.  We had to wear our fancy boots for this because we were getting off of the skiff and stepping right into the water and then up to shore.  This is called a zodiac landing.  We were all in shock and awe as we stepped off the skiff right into and onto a beach teeming with life.  I was scared to walk for fear of stepping on a starfish or one of the huge sunflower stars.  Everywhere we looked there was something big and alive.

 Above, Jane is holding the Sunflower Star (I know it's sunflower something....) upside down to take a look at all of those tentacles.  It can have up to 24 arms.  Below is a picture of it on the shore.  We saw dozens of these.

 We picked up and checked out clams, sea urchins, crabs, stars, little eel looking things called gunnels, chitons, and I can't remember what all else.  It was fascinating.

 We spent a couple of hours out on this shore walk and eventually made our way over to all of the rocks you see above, Joe loved that part of course.  He found a big kelp "whip" and flung that around for a while making an exciting snapping sound and later walked in the water with Ollie checking out the starfish and sunflower stars that were just offshore underwater.

 It's hard to see but there's a big brown sea anemone in the pic above.  We didn't touch those but there were tons of those as well.

 Harriet, Billy, Grace and I took the first skiff back to the boat while the rest of the fam stayed for more shore walking.  Hannah took our pic as we left.

Each day on the boat you were given multiple choices of activities to do so while we were shore walking, some others were snorkeling, and some others did a guided kayak tour.  We were all back on the boat by lunchtime and spent the rest of the day cruising to a good spot for whale watching.  On the way we passed this rock full of very loud sea lions.  

 There was no time to get bored even on cruising days--the crew set out activities for the kids and on this afternoon they painted, decorated cookies, and also got to observe plankton through a microscope and then draw what they saw on a table covered in paper nearby.  We also played more games--Skip-Bo and Bananagrams and later Clue.

 Here are pictures of our wildlife sighting list that later extended off the board and onto the map and a picture of a big map showing where we had been and where we were.

 And, I forgot, they had an afternoon yoga class with the younger kids.

We were rewarded once again with a plethora of whales.  We anchored the ship and watched them for a couple of hours.  Some chose to swim very close to our boat and one swam right up next to it and pooped.  That red stuff in the pic above my friends is....whale poo.  We could see the whole body of this whale as he swam up right next to our boat, it was amazing.  Mostly we saw the whales from a distance where you would see their spout, the humpback, and then fluke.  We did see some lunge feeding though where the whale will sort of lunge it's mouth out of the water and we were thrilled to see a whale breach for us 3 times!  It was pretty amazing to watch.  Whale watching ended day 2 for us....another beautiful day full of new discoveries.