Waves on a grey sea

High tide, these days, comes in with rolling, pounding waves, even without wind to drive them. When it stops raining, paddle boarders and surfers join the ducks offshore.

Shelter Bay beach, with wave crawler. There's another four or five hidden behind the waves. Looking southeast.

Splash!

Just rocks and the tail end of a wave.

Looking northeast, towards Quadra Island. The water looks blue from this angle, grey to the south. The water in the centre of the channel is smooth, but along both shores there's that line of white froth where the currents collide.

Unbeatable

The waves were strong and relentless. Along the shoreline, they were picking up logs and hauling them out to sea, only to toss them back on the rocks with the next roller, like so many sticks from a game of pick-up-sticks.

Five logs on the way out.

With each wave, the stones on the beach rattled and rumbled, rolling down, being thrown back up. An unexpectedly high wave pulled the stones out from under my feet, tossing me back on my tail end in the wet. It was lucky for me that the stones felt soft, as they slid loosely in the surf. I was not hurt, much.

And coming back in.

And yet ... and yet ... Among the rolling stones, I find fragile pieces of shell, sea critters, even spider webs, holding their own against the pounding waves.

Molted carapace of a small kelp crab.

Soft sponge

So fragile! A piece of hydrocoral, tangled with seaweeds. Found half-buried in rolling stones.

Molted piece of crab belly plate.

And last, above the reach of the waves at the moment, but still within their spray zone, an old stump, torn and battered, and sheltering, among other things, a community of spiders.

These shells and stone were at my elbow height above the beach, and above the high tide line. Somehow they've been tossed up here, out of the reach of most waves. And if you look closely, there are at least two spider webs tying the stump together. I'm not sure, but I think there's a greyish spider in the centre of the main one. Do you see it?

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, ... ; but time and chance happeneth to them all. Ecclesiastes 9:11, KJV (just because I like the KJV language.)

Intrepid!

At low tide, I walked along the Mazatlan shoreline to a group of low rocks, most of them covered with each wave, but exposed in between. I skirted the perimeter, where the waves licked at my sandals and ran in channels beside me. Further out, a large flock of surfbirds descended with each retreating wave to feed on the draining rocks.

Hurry, hurry! Next wave's coming!

Eating on the run

Good thing they have wings!

10-second break

On to the next rock; this one's gone.

I managed to get close to a few of the birds.

Unidentified sandpipers.  Surfbirds, Calidris virgata*. Brown, black and white pattern on back, spotted bellies, yellow legs, straight, yellow and blackish beak.

They seem to be poking their beaks into small cracks in the rocks.

I looked carefully at the rocks I could reach, and fished in channels where the water was shallow enough between one wave and the next, to see what the surfbirds were catching. On the rock surfaces, I saw mostly barnacles, tiny ones. Down in the channels, bits of rockweed held tiny snails and hermit crabs. I saw a crab or two.

Tiny barnacles and a snail or two.

Rockweed, underwater. Some of those snails are hermit crabs.

Good eating here!

The tide came in. The rocks disappeared. So did the surfbirds. I went home for supper.

*Updated to correct species. Thanks, Clare!

Supercritters

High above the rocks and surf, a diver waits for the right moment, the right wave. Repeatedly, he tenses as if to leap, then relaxes. Finally, the wave seems right; he's off!

Free fall.

Once down, he faces the next challenge; reaching the rocks he has to climb without being pounded to a pulp against them. Again and again, he turns and dives through the incoming wall of water; it's too high, too close, too solid. In a brief moment of calm as the ocean gathers itself for a fresh onslaught, he reaches the rock face and scrambles quickly up to safety.

It seems that nothing made of flesh could survive the relentless pounding of tons of water against immovable rocks.

Below the dive platform

Spraying, rushing, boisterous water.

But there is life, even in this tumult.

Seaweeds and maybe anemones in the surf.

At the far end of the beach, behind a breakwater, I waded out at low tide one day to look at some of the growing things on the rocks. The greenery on the rock above is a variety of rockweed; some of the darker things, at least on the breakwater, seemed to be tightly compacted anemones, a dark, spiky weed, and some sort of soft encrusting growth. A brighter green hair also grows on these rocks; short strands, probably kept trimmed by the rushing water.

Back to the rocks below the dive tower:

Rocks with assorted seaweeds.

But look what showed up when I zoomed the photos to full size!

Do you see the crab on the far right?

Zooming in even more. I don't know what those little critters are; there were others scattered around the seaweed areas.

A bit of sandstone sculpted by the waves among the stones at the base of the seawall. The waves reach this area, pounding downward, then draining quickly away; the current is swift and strong.

Zooming in. Long-legged crabs and tiny snails.

In another area of the beach, I collected some of those tiny snails; a fair number of them were hermit crabs. Some of these on the sandstone seem to be hermits, too. How they hold on as the water comes and goes, I can't imagine.

One of the hermits. About the size of a grain of rice.

And the next wave rushes in. The crabs and hermits and snails hold on; it's what they're used to.