Laguna Beach - Day 6 (Little Corona Del Mar Beach & Dolphin and Whale Tours) - Part 1 of 3

Wanting to shake up the beach plan a little bit and knowing that Gavin's favorite thing in life is exploring the environment around him, I spent an evening researching the best tide pools around.  Fortunately, there are some gems within close driving distance from Laguna Beach.  We ended up at a place called Little Corona Del Mar Beach.  I had been to the main Corona Del Mar beach when I (Brent) was much younger, but never this smaller little beach area.  We were blessed with a very close parking spot which was up the cliffs a bit and a few blocks away and then you have to hike down.  As you can see in the distance, a lot of the rocks that come into the ocean make for great tide pools when the tide goes out.  The same rocks exist in the other direction, as well.  We also were able to research when low tide would be and timed our trip accordingly for maximum exposure.

The family got right to work looking for all the creatures and stuff we could find.  It was actually a bit treacherous to navigate all the rocks and waves coming through, but we tried to stay on the mostly dryer parts.

There were quite a lot of these little crab guys hiding in the pools.  This one is about the size of one of the kids' fists.  They would quickly try to find a place to go in the shadows fearing we were some predator.

As we got further out on the rocks we saw lots of these purple sea urchins which were pretty neat looking.  The crabs or other creatures must feed on them because we also saw lots of urchin bones which end up looking like a solid white ball with no purple left on them.

We did get some time in the ocean as well, but most of our time was spent in the tide pools.  Here is Gavin testing how far we will let him go out before we call him back closer to shore.  The hard part is you want to let him go out and experience the waves, but he was still not a great swimmer at this time and when that wave comes through it almost completely swamps him.  Usually he was just fine to pop back up, but at waist deep already, there isn't a great margin for error so we kept very close eye on him and shortly after this picture I went out to be within arms reach of him.  As you can also see, Tara and Gage are standing a bit closer in a much safer location.