Foraging at minus tide on the Sonoma Coast
Story and photos by Cheryl Angelina Koehler
A minus tide is a low tide that falls below the average low-water mark. It’s an ideal time to explore the ocean shoreline, and we’re here on the Sonoma Coast climbing over rocks encrusted with seaweeds, limpets, barnacles, and mussels, creeping around tidepools alive with large sea stars, tiny crabs, and sea anemones of myriad colors. The latter—a group of predatory marine invertebrates constituting the order Actiniaria—look like pulsing pebble-covered everything bagels when left exposed by the retreating water. As the sea rushes in to refill the pools, the anemones turn back into otherworldly undulating flowers. Here, as everywhere, the huge, powerful expanse of the ocean—with its dizzying array of species—seems so endless and enduring…but, in fact, it’s not. The reality of the ocean’s resources as finite and fragile was a thread woven through the conversation during this March mussels foraging class with Berkeley-based foraging and ecology company Fork in the Path.
Gathering on the ocean bluff, we learn about the foray ahead of us. Fork in the Path founder Carrie Staller introduces this outing’s leader, Ricardo Romero Gianoli, a naturalist who works as a bilingual educator with the East Bay Regional Park District. They mention some pushback that had come from a local community group about scheduling a trip that might encourage unsustainable extraction of wild mussels from their natural habitat. Would participants take more than the 10 pounds that our one-day $20 fishing licenses allow us? Would we come back surreptitiously for more mussels or divulge the location, perhaps harm the environment we were clambering through by not understanding it?
While gingerly climbing down the steep cliff to the tidepools, I ponder the ease of hopping over to Berkeley’s Monterey Fish Market for some perfectly delicious mussels sustainably farmed in Washington State, but that would bypass the chance to be here contemplating the watery world of Mytilus californianus (the local wild mussel) while learning about safe and responsible foraging and sharing a feast on the beach.
Our group comes with a discernible pattern of motivations: 1) love of good food, 2) love for the ocean, and 3) a desire to learn more about marine species. A few participants arrive with impressive credentials in biology or ecology, and some of us want to know more about the crisis in the oceans’ kelp forests…