Wednesday, July 22: Day 40

What an amazing place! Our campsite was a couple minutes walk to what's called "Outside Beach", which has a huge tide difference--going from -6 to +23, with 2 high and 2 low tides a day. On low tide you can go beach combing to find things like star fish (Outside Beach has 12 species), Sand dollars, dunce-cap shells (they look like chinese hats), clams, mussels, jellyfish, crabs, sea urchins, barnacles, and anemone. Deaper in they have giant pacific octopus which are the largest Octopus in the world, growing up to nine feet. The people here are very resourceful with the sea life that they find and use the summer season to gather food for the winter, since most people do their food shopping in Homer and only make a few trips a year. (And for good reason, Matthias and I found a gallon-sized container of ice cream for $17!)

After certification in the morning, we went beach combing and exploring. Here are just a few pictures I took during the course of the afternoon:

This anemone was in-between two large rocks in a little pool of water left from the earlier high tide. It was so cool to see it up close!

This is as close as I ever want to be to a jellyfish. Shortly after this picture, one of the girls decided to disect it in a very brutal way. It was a sad way to see it go, although I'm pretty sure it was already dead.

This big rock was climbable, which many of us took the opportunity to do, starting with Matthias. The first two pictures below are different shots of the hill and the 3rd is Matthias before he made his ascent. Once at the top, you had great views of the ocean and surrounding cliffs.

This is Brandon Wilson, the other priesthood leader, making his way around a precarious rock. Later on in the week, he convinced some of the girls to try climbing all the way around the rock in their swim gear and every one of those girls got cut up and hurt in some way. Ironically, he made it out without a scratch. Hmmm....

This is Matthias and Haleigh when we were watching Brandon do his dangerous trick. Below that is Cara, probably thinking Brandon is pretty crazy.

One of my favorite parts of the beach was how steep the cliffs were that came right to the edge of the water. And on top of that, how close the trees came to the edge of the cliffs. Here is one that looks a bit suicidal.

After dinner we had some fun playing "signs" and this animal game Brandon taught us that was funny because everyone had a different animal sound/action that they passed on. It was a game of speed and it was funny to see everyone making the animal faces and getting into it.