East Coast Re-run

Sometime last year during one of the early evening low tides I had my first chance encounter on a precious spread of sand flat that harboured the largest population of sand dollars I'd ever seen. YC and I flung our bikes onto the sand as we bounced off to check out a large sand flat exposed in a rare low tide that exposed East Coast this much.

A few weeks later, I popped by again after a run and scheduled to meet the fraternal unit there to show him around that stretch. Did I mention he is useful for a shiny new DSLR?

As we waded into the shallow waters, a first surprise was 2 huge mud crabs sitting at the edge of the opening of a large canal. The brother, always unwilling to get his hands dirty, egged me on to poke the buggers, because we were convinced they were dead. Well it turns out they were indeed rather lifeless. Who released these guys, we'll never know.

I took him along the sand bar where I found the massive populations of button snails and we encountered a funny little boy who was curious about a sand star I'd found. He asked many questions about how it "walks" and I explained to him about how the sea star moves and burrows. Later, we spied a fisherman with his hyperactive jack russell terrier bounding around on the sand, getting suitably muddy and wet.

I went further down the beach to check on the carpet anemone I found on my earlier trip and it was still there, looking like it was ready to be entirely buried in sediment. It's interesting, there weren't any other carpet anemones in the entire stretch.

As we headed back to the tide gently coming in, we saw another dead mud crab about the same size along the shore adjacent to the canal.