Continued from Cali Coast Day 4 Part 2.

I am way behind on blogging, and everyday I get a little bit more behind. I am running about two days behind right now.

I have been taking a lot more photos than I had anticipated for this trip. That’s a good thing. The amount of photos I take is correlated to the amount of photo worthy things I see. It’s been an excellent trip, exceeded my expectations.

Complimentary breakfast from the hotel. Since the breakfast room is just downstairs, we brought the food up to the room.

Packed up the bags, and now we are ready to visit the aquarium. So excited.

We checked out of the hotel, put the bags in the car, and took a short stroll to the aquarium.

Back again.

They are not worried about others stealing their luggage.

Yes!!!! I love aquariums!!!

There is a line, but it’s was swift moving. We waited maybe 5 minutes.

The boiler from the old cannery that used to be on this site.

An aquarium staff answering questions and holding a tube of water with a crab in it. Fuck, there’s bad news. They don’t have any sunfish on display right now. Apparently, they are such slow swimmers, they have to be trained to be fed by hand. The other fish will steal their food because they swim so slow. Noooo!!!! I was so excited…

We are picking up our CityPass, that includes the tickets to this aquarium and other attractions in SF.

Kinda shot themselves in the foot.

I love taking photos of aquarium divers.

Ohhhh, ahhhhh. This tank contains the fishes of the Monterey Bay.

Red abalone. I’d like to eat that.

There are many exhibits on the tidal pools and the marine lives that habitat there. There’s this exhibit where you spin the wheel and it flows the water in one direct, then you can reverse and it’ll spin in the water in the other direction. It’s fun to watch the fish reverse directions.

To mimic the waters splashing onto the shore. This is a very active aquarium.

Touch pool. I believe that’s a skate.

The same type of red beaked bird that we saw yesterday.

The wave maker for the tidal pool. A long piece of angled plate dips into the water, then makes a quick upward motion, creating the wave.

The potential photo ops were endless…but I didn’t want to get kicked out…sigh…

Crab hiding under a rock.

Floating magnifying glass.

Sea cucumber.

Sand dollars

Brittle stars.

I saw a display just like this in the Monaco aquarium. There are halibuts on both sides, half turn light, the other half turn dark.

Skate egg casing.

This starfish was giant! It was probably the size of a bowling ball.

A giant octopus. It was also kind of ugly.

I spy an ocean.

Found it.

Cuttlefish. They look so conniving.

This shrimp was cleaning off the skin of the eel.

I don’t think I’ve seen many other penguin enclosures with starfish in the water.

The tanks viewed from above.

Spiny lobster. It was HUGE. I bet it was 20 or 30 pounds.

Anchovies.

Touch pool. It felt like…a crab.

Heh. I am a child.

This was pretty cool. An entire school of fish swimming at a circular tank overhead.

In this window, the fish only swam in one direction, but the tank was in a loop, so it seemed like an infinity school of swimming fish.

Of course, jellyfish. If I am a billionaire, I’d have tanks of jellyfish, just because.

It’s a shame, because these photos didn’t come out nearly as well as I thought. The Sony RX100(my camera) does a lot of things well automatically, so I just assumed that it would continue to do the same in an aquarium. Well, seemed like I’d have to adjust some of the settings next time.

I love watching these giant schools of fish, how they all move in unison.

Upside down jellyfish.

These were cool. They had music playing, and most of the jellyfish in here pumped to the same beat as the music. I wonder if these jellyfish have an inherent beats per minute, and they just picked the music to match?

I don’t know what these are called, but I am going to call them sperm jellyfish.

These remind me of chocolate and vanilla cupcakes. I’ll have a chocolate, please.

They grow their own jellyfish here in the aquarium.

Cool.

Yellowfin tuna. It’s easy to forget how big tunas can get.

To be continued at Cali Coast Day 5 Part 2.