And you know what else I should’ve brought? Dramamine. I don’t generally get motion-sick, but then I’m generally in a car or something else land-based, not out on the water. So when I moved up to the prow to get where the action is...
...it struck me pretty quickly why my people never adapted to the sea. Urk. Good thing they had an open cleat at my level, right?
So much for getting my sea paws, then; after telling the captain to turn us around ahead of schedule, I had to settle for flipping through the whale-sighting guide in the cabin while trying to come up with a Plan B for my day. Well, beyond getting a second breakfast.
Problem was, it was still pretty early, and the rest of Fisherman’s Wharf was barely roused. Anyone? No chowder samples or anything?
In fact, the only place I saw that was fully open? The candy store. You can always count on a waterfront sugar pusher! Let’s see, at this price it’ll break down to $11.11 worth of sugar each for my eight brothers and me—guess I’d better get two, huh?
Then after some real food in Pacific Grove, I decided the best way for me to see any sea life was to double-back for Cannery Row, where the Monterey Bay Aquarium sits. I love aquariums—I could hang out at the Aquarium of the Pacific all day and occasionally have—and big public ones are the only kind available to me ever since Rob finally retired the tank we had at home, which I fondly referred to as the guppy killatorium. Wonder if that had anything to do with him finally deciding to give it up?
Unfortunately, there was no whale-watching to be had for me here either—despite once standing in for “the Cetacean Institute” back when it opened in the mid-’80s, the aquarium’s only whale is the skeleton of a young male gray that washed up on the shore and now hangs in the main lobby. Great. Now where am I supposed to score some ambergris?
In fact, the only mammals that reside here are a few otters, but ten minutes of watching them yielded no more of a show than them rolling around in the water constantly and washing their faces like they had OCD. So we moved on to the Open Sea, a 1.2 million-gallon tank—I’m up on the mezzanine here, and this is still only part of the ninety-foot viewing panel—and a selection of fish that includes sardines, Pacific mackerel, dolphinfish, the only bluefin and yellowfin tuna exhibited in an American aquarium, on and on. The sharks are the biggest draw, both the hammerhead and the great white, although the latter’s a juvenile and only a few feet long...
...but personally, I’m always going to be more interested in the oddball of the tank, which in this case is the enormous sunfish, here cruising by in between the multiple siestas I saw it catching. Well, these guys are not only big but downright fugly from the front, so I don’t think anybody can begrudge them whatever beauty sleep they can get.
And then on the other end of the spectrum are the critters that are tiny even at my scale. I guess cardinal shrimp have caught on with home aquarists in recent years, but this is the first time I’ve seen any close up; gotta love the white antennae and legs that make them look so alien and the blazing red hue that makes them look so artificially colored. Don’t know if that camouflages them in their native environment, but it sure makes me not wanna eat ’em, so mission accomplished!
As of this writing, a new jellyfish area is under construction and scheduled to open next year, but the existing one is certainly nothing to sneeze at, from the sea nettles that drift up and down in the most transfixing fashion, almost like a living lava lamp...
...to the equally graceful moon jellies, on display here in two sizes in separate tanks. Hey, I can see up that one’s skirt!
As for other recent developments, we narrowly missed the flamingos exhibit that closed just weeks before our visit, but fortunately, the Secret Life of Seahorses is still open. Quite a few of the little quirks of nature are here along with such relatives as pipefish and sea dragons, but this is where I really started to get a sense of the aquarium’s interactive displays. Take a photo with a giant model of a seahorse? Why not—here’s an animal combination you don’t generally see in nature. Giddyap, Storm!
Or try this video game, where you choose a station, then adjust the corresponding seahorse’s color, size, and spininess to match the randomly selected background so as to avoid being eaten by a larger fish. Getting one right in the allotted time is easy, sure, but doing all three at once? Much harder, especially with paws. Stand clear!
There’s even a micro-theater where you can sit and watch an animated loop of seahorse courtship rituals that...
...whoa! Seahorse porn!
That aside, the aquarium is as kid-driven an experience as it is a paws-on one. The Mission to the Deep room is basically just a big submarine game, and even the area dedicated to Hovden Cannery—the last of the Cannery Row fish-tinneries, the site of which the aquarium now occupies—makes sure to keep the little ones occupied so their parents have a chance to read the historical placards. The adults get to view a partial reproduction of Doc Ricketts’ lab, complete with some of his personal effects; the kids get to play with the steam valves on a model boiler. Everybody wins!
Then upstairs, there are not one but two activity areas geared toward young families. I did one of those take-home rubbings on the marine mammal side...
...and reenacted Botticelli on the fish side—well, sort of.
But if all the fun and games don’t get across the aquarium’s mission statement of ocean conservation, then there’s always the Vanishing Wildlife section to hammer it home. Here you can see some hard facts about overfishing and pick up one of the regularly updated pockets guides that tell you which kinds of seafood are eco-sensible and which aren’t.
Uh-oh. Guess I’d better not say anything about my last trip to Chinatown.
Luckily, the aquarium restaurant offers up a selection of environmentally responsible dishes, meaning I can still get my moules-frites on—in this case, mussels in a Thai curry sauce with garlic fries on the side! And each table comes with a pair of binoculars and a sighting guide if you want to check out the gulls and cormorants in the bay through the picture windows. Or do like I did and go all Rear Window on some kayakers.
Speaking of the feathery kind: The aquarium’s purview also extends into shorebird rehabilitation, with an enclosed but airy aviary that allows visitors to get so close to the birds that you can practically reach out and touch them. But, you know, don’t.
Or if the local birds aren’t exciting enough for you, there are also puffins and penguins onsite, with the latter exhibit featuring a small bubble dome that similarly lets you get right up in their faces.
Excuse me, hi? I ordered cakes and tea—are those on their way? Okay, can I at least get my raspberry ice? Well, that’ll be reflected in your tip, then.
But if you’re looking for animals you can get genuinely up close and personal with, you can’t miss the touch pools—literally, since there are both upstairs and downstairs versions here. I’ll pass, though; I’m sure feeling a pink star or a gumboot chiton or a bat ray is really cool, fur just takes forever to dry. But wouldn’t you know: For those of us too squeamish to go splash around in a real tide pool, there’s a video game for that as well.
So here’s an interesting little factoid: The aquarium actually pumps fresh seawater through its exhibits, drawing about 2,000 gallons of it from the bay per minute and circulating it through more than a hundred tanks. And one of the biggest reasons for this is the Kelp Forest—the giant kelp growing there needs a regular flow of seawater from which to draw its nutrients. High maintenance. But it truly is “giant,” as you can see from the two-story viewing window.
...yet I kind of prefer this smaller, bathysphere-style window—makes it easier to take in the swaying, sunlit serenity of the underwater world without having your eye drawn every which way. I feel so Cousteau here.
More serene still is the Monterey Bay Habitats wing, where we find the Deep Reef tank. The mood lighting, obviously, is in keeping with the dimmer sun down where the white sturgeons, leopard sharks, and plumed anemones live, the latter growing on the rocks in a way that makes a slightly surreal little forest of the world below. Anybody else suddenly craving cauliflower?
And really, while sea life in general can be pretty weird compared to us terrestrial sorts, the deep is where it truly takes a turn for the odd. Here we have a colony of feathery, quill-like sea pens—an animal, not a plant—and a couple of mermaid’s purses, which are actually just the singular-looking egg sacs of skates, not cryptid accessories. Nor are they Jenny Hanivers, though that’s getting a lot warmer.
Here’s an octopus’ garden for you—tube anemones, their tentacles dreamily waving even in the faintest of currents. I could sit and watch these for hours...but the longer I do, the more the New Age music that they play down here makes sense, which is probably a sign I should move on.
Not surprisingly, the aquarium manages to turn that constant influx of seawater into a display in its own right—down on the first floor, there’s a walkthrough tunnel that some of the water flushes over every thirty seconds, giving the sense of being under a series of regularly crashing waves. Loud, and yet oddly soothing too...but then I suppose it is pretty much the ultimate white noise machine.
So we end the day outside at the Great Tide Pool Amphitheater, overlooking the bay itself. Well...I may not have gotten close to a live whale after all, but I’d say seeing a few hundred of its contemporaries, from the mundane to the extraordinary, is a pretty reasonable tradeoff. Kind of a waste of all that harpoon training, though.
Oh, right—I’m not supposed to hunt sea life anymore, that’s the takeaway here. Guess it’s burgers for dinner, then.
