Looking For Life Part 2

On our second visit to the beach, we saw even more life then before. It was an active day. Fish were jumping, the wind was blowing. We had bought a net the day before at the pool store. It wasn’t the best net ever, but it still worked. It was a thin wood dowel with a small net on the end. We went into the water to try to catch some sand fish and small silver fish. We didn’t have much luck, dad caught a baby stingray but he let it go. With no fish in our bucket, “aquarium,” as my sister calls it, we decided to go for a walk. As we walked, we saw fish flipping out of the water and groups of the tiny green and silver fish. There must have been thousands, millions! Our dad caught two of them. Marcella kept holding them out of the water, and they died……. As we kept walking there was a huge stingray that passed by us, and I freaked out. We all got out of the water and kept walking. We kept walking until we saw this shadow in the water. It passed by and dad told us it was a sand shark. It was pretty cool. It was about 1 ¼ long. We also saw dolphins jumping and fish getting tangled up in something. I saw two spots in the water that I thought were stingrays but they were crabs, scary crabs. We saw more of those little fish, and my dad tried catching them again. Conclusion: He broke the dowel to the net. Dad had sun poisoning and the rest of us were tired, so we decided to go back to our stuff. Dad and I spotted a stingray or a crab trying to catch a fish.

I spotted a group of people and we headed over to see what was going on. They were huddled around a bunch of turtle eggs. The eggs had already hatched. Dad went to go get the camera and the marine people there were testing to see why some didn’t hatch. Someone told me 132 of them hatched. I looked in one of the eggs that had already hatched, and there was a dead turtle in it so 131 had a chance. We walked back to our stuff and some people said they saw a 3ft long stingray. I went into the water with Marcella’s goggles to look for fish. I found some of the sand fish and silver fish. They like to nibble on your feet, so tons of them came over to my feet and nibbled on them. Then too many came and I kicked them all away. They came back and their big friend came to. Their friend felt like it was a good 2ft long. I kicked it away and went to shore. I had 2 jellyfish stings. Marcella had caught some fish. I had caught 4, and she brought back 2 hermit crabs. I went back in to see some more fish and I got stung again so I was done for the day. Dad kept getting bit by flies and James kept hitting the fish in the bucket. We were all ready to go so we headed out and said good bye to Gulf shores.