Two miles of beach to ourselves (almost) on Sunday

In addition to the trip to Canoa, we decided this past weekend to have another adventure, a walk on the Pacific beach south of Bahia, at least to the point of land we could see in the distance. I wore my pedometer to know how far we walked. I checked for low tide time on the computer. This area is inaccessible during high tide, and we didn’t want to get stranded on a rock if the tide came in while we were walking. On Sunday, high tide was at 10:02 am and low tide was at 4:38 pm. We ate lunch near the beach and began our trek at about 1:15 pm, as the tide had gone out enough to see beach, not water, all the way to the point, and the tide would be going out more while we walked.

What amazed us the most was the surface of the beach. I say beach and you think sand. Yes, however…. close to the hills that border the beach and for some stretches of beach we did find just sand. Most of the way, we encountered surfaces of the following:

flat stones,

areas with channels running thru the rock surface,

gritty, light tan sandstone type areas,

areas that felt like walking on barnacles, in which the tiny sea critters scurried about,

larger rock rock outcroppings that extended out in the water – that we had to climb on, of course,

(unlike the rock scrambling that I did at Puerto Lopez on the previous trip, I did not slip and cut my knee this time)

and sand…. we did have stretches of sandy beach extending out into the water. This picture was taken looking back toward Bahia from the point of land that had been our destination. We did walk around the point a little farther, making it two miles along on the beach, and then two miles back.

We even came across moss-covered rocks. I would not have thought that moss would cover rocks in salt water, but it does. I avoided walking across these areas, thinking that the moss was probably something’s primary food source.

And the rocks…. unusually shaped because of the wear of the water.

This one was in the hillside, a scoop of rock ice cream!

We encountered only a few other people. Some were finding their meal in the rocks, capturing these critters, crabs that live in the rock crevices:

Several areas had rocks encrusted with these, but the critters inside are either inedible or they aren’t worth the effort because we didn’t see anyone picking them off the rocks.

Especially out away from town, we found some beautiful shells. Phillip couldn’t resist combing the beach for them, with the bigger ones found near the hillside.

Since I was the one carrying most of the shells, we did keep some as we walked back to town. Shells can get heavy, so we didn’t collect them walking out from town! We could have gotten many, many more, especially the white ones, but we were judicious in our selections (that is a rock in the upper right corner… I couldn’t resist it):

By the time we returned and got almost to town, three men were out in the water with their fishing nets.

And one final picture, of Phillip crossing one of the eroded streams. I just like the composition of the picture.