Reef walking and the tsunami

My friend Jill and I went out one afternoon to check out the reefs around Cape Zanpa. Here are some of the fun things we checked out!

 Sea urchin

 Starfish...loosing color??

 Six legged blue starfish!!!!!

 Um. I don't know, but it looked cool :)

Disturbing & gross & fast moving. Eww.

Cool clam shell lodged in the coral...and there was living stuff inside of it!!

March 11, 2011. The day of the horrible Japan earthquake and tsunami. Well, we felt nothing from the earthquake, but we were under tsunami warnings for most of the evening. We were very fortunate that the time the tsunami was to come ashore was our low tide! So I took a couple pics, but they don't show much... basically, the tide usually takes several hours to go from low tide (where the reef near that pier is totally exposed) to high tide. When the 'tsunami' did come, it was very small and it caused the tide to change in a matter of minutes. I think it took about 3-4 minutes total to fill in the reef area...but the water level never rose above where high tide reaches. So the pic below really only shows the 'turbidity' of the water as the tides were changing. 

 This is a pic of what all of the ships did during the tsunami! You can see all of them lined up facing north to south out on the ocean. Once the ships started moving, we knew that we were probably in the clear.