Search for Ocean Creatures: More Than a Day at the Beach

If you’re a bad golfer, you’ll probably make a good beachcomber.

Say you’re a 24 handicapper. This means you spend lots of time rooting around for your ball in such impenetrable places as ice plants, scrub brush, high clover, tall grass and, occasionally, jungle. But you stay with it. You find the ball nearly every time.

Now let’s say you’re on the beach, at the Dana Point Marine Life Preserve, for instance. You’re stalking the wild starfish. You pick your way out into the shallow water, through the rocks close to shore. A few minutes later you’re up to your knees in brine, staring like a dog on point at the rocky bottom. Staring. And staring.

This is just like looking for a lost golf ball, or would be if you were looking for the ball while peering through a big glass of foamy beer.

That’s right. Because just when you think you’re on to something, that there’s something down there that might be intriguing, a wave washes in and obliterates everything.

Beachcombing doesn’t provide instant gratification.

I found this out on a recent visit to the Dana Point Marine Life Preserve, just beyond the Orange County Marine Institute, where Dana Point comes to an actual point at the base of the shale and sandstone cliffs. There, at waterside, is a jumble of rocks, boulders and stony outcroppings that form a series of tide pools that are ideal homes for all sorts of bite-size marine life.

The beauty part is that you can see these little animals up close without skin-diving gear. The trick is to avoid looking like a flamingo on roller skates while you’re doing it.

Harry Helling had prepared me, sort of. The associate executive director of the marine institute, Helling gave me a series of advance tips on tide-pool exploration techniques and safety. Never, he said, turn your back on the waves. They may lap gently for a few minutes, and “then you can get some sets that are larger.” Check the tide charts, too, he said, and note when you can expect a rising tide. And finally, “never jump from rock to rock.”

I arrived at the marine institute about half an hour before low tide, listed that day at 2:55 p.m., and bought a book Helling had recommended: “Pacific Intertidal Life,” a $2.50 pocket-size guide to the things that ooze through the shallows. (Survival tip: Read it before you wade into the water. You’ll look silly, and feel vulnerable, if you read it during your exploration.)

Next, I paid a visit to museum volunteer Eula Ryan, who stood above a saltwater tank filled with tide-pool creatures and happily explained to a group of fascinated kids what each weird-looking thing was.

Finally, armed with an eyeful of my quarry, I climbed down the concrete stairs to the beach and the rocks below and waded out into foot-high water around the nearest rocks.

I recalled Helling’s “low-impact exploration techniques,” remembering that I had just entered a wildlife preserve where absolutely everything is protected: Don’t take anything away with you (including shells and rocks); if you pick an animal up, return it to exactly the same place; don’t pry at anything with sticks, and walk gently, taking care not to step on any marine animals.

It’s that walking gently part you take to heart in a big way. The reason: The only thing more slippery than a rock that has just recently been exposed by the tide is freshly Zamboni’d rink ice. Most of them are covered with a moss-like growth that turns them to butter. Even my ripple-soled surf shoes wouldn’t grip.

At first, I didn’t think I was seeing much, the result, I suppose, of having starfish on the brain. Heck, even the cover of “Pacific Intertidal Life” had a starfish on it. All I was finding--or so I thought--were anemones-- hundreds of anemones. Mostly, I found out later when I read the book, giant green anemones and brooding anemones. These are fun to touch lightly, because they instantly react and fold up.

But in the moments between wave surges, I was also seeing limpets (I thought they were barnacles) of all sorts, chitons (which looked like tiny prehistoric fossils), snails, periwinkles, worm shells, actual barnacles, all sorts of kelp and algae, and mussels by the thousands.

But no starfish, or octopuses, or sea slugs, or crabs, or any other tide-pool mega-stars. I stayed out there for more than an hour, picking my way over and between the slippery rocks like a mountain climber scaling a vertical wall, and when I finally decided to give up, I found myself a couple of hundred yards from my starting point. I had covered quite a bit more ground than I thought.

I checked back in with Ryan about the lack of starfish. “Unfortunately,” she said, smiling a bit wanly, “a lot of people still carry things away.”

Helling, too, had said that “most of the problems that we have are with relatively naive visitors” who unknowingly upset the ecology of the preserve. I frowned at the memory until I heard a mother with a couple of children in tow telling them as they came off the beach, “No, this is a place where you have to leave everything where it is.”

I came home empty-handed--my nylon running pants wet to the hips, my surf shoes full of sand--with the odd satisfaction that while I had not upset the balance of the preserve, the slick, wave-tossed, slippery preserve had several times almost upset me.