I really could get used to this. I truly could. Today was another day at the beach for us. Manresa State beach to be exact. It’s a lovely flat expanse of sand that stretches on as far as the eye can see, and sits smack in the middle of Monterey Bay.

The surf was beautiful today, and there were a lot of surfers out enjoying it. This really is the best time of the year for beach visits here. The weather is transitioning, and producing an upwelling of the deep waters in the bay. This bring the warmer waters close to the shore and produces a comfortable climate on the coast, clear with a light breeze. All summer long it’s foggy, windy, and cold on the coast, odd isn’t it? Fall and winter are the best!

We had company today. There were lots of people enjoying the day, and seagulls. At this time of the year there is a mixture of age groups roaming the beach looking for things to eat. The mottled grey ones are “adolescent” gulls. They are funny, they are in mid molt and they don’t have their adult voices yet, so they sound like they’ve been hanging out smoking their parents cigarettes all day. They even look like trouble! Roaming gangs of them were everywhere…just looking for something to get in to.

The pictures in this post were taken on our Thursday trip to the same beach. I didn’t take the camera with me today. I didn’t feel like messing with it and worrying about it in the sand. Kiddo and mom had fun, too. Today we found a big hole that someone had dug, for who knows why. Kiddo had a blast in it, claiming it as his fort and enjoying his beach snacks in there. :)

Hubby even had a good time…getting a picture of him is about as hard as getting one of me.

As we were walking along the beach we kept seeing these bright green balls rolling in the surf. They look like balls of moss. I have no idea what they are, but they sure are pretty!

There were also a lot of sand dollars washing up, of all sizes. Mussels were working their way to the surface of the sand, and tumbling in the water we also found some crabs. A bit like hermit crabs, hiding in shells that weren’t their own, but, they didn’t have the big claw that most hermits have to seal their shells. They had long thin claws that were very hairy and their bodies were pale yellow. Who knows. I’ll keep looking to see if I can find them online anywhere. They were quite funny. They would roll up in the waves, then as the waves washed out, the crabs would spread their legs out to try to keep from tumbling and rolling…then try to dig themselves in to the sand.

Hmm…I think that’s about it for today. One last sunset photo just to rub it in!

Psst…you can right click on all of these images and select view image to see the full sized versions of them!

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