Touch

On a recent walk along Sharky’s Beach Lottie and I paddled around in the rock pools at a very low tide. She remembered straight away our previous encounters with the eight-legged creatures of legend that brought ships down to Davy Jones’s Locker and so we just had to look out for them.

The rocky outcrop that we’re so fond of poking around in was probably formed a zillion years ago when the tectonic plates were having a creep about somewhere out in the Pacific. As a result it’s more like a rocky platform jutting into the sea made of thousands of horizontal layers of shale that are split all over as you would guillotine a ream of paper. A short distance further up on land this platform becomes the Illawarra escarpment.

We’ve had quite a variety of sea dwellers turn up on these little shoreline walks including dark brown horned nudibranchs, beautiful orange and purple sea dragons (although he was dead), little sand gobies and a myriad of crustaceans.

The bright winter sun lit the water-filled fissures in the rock and soon we’d followed a purple frilly goby along one of the long cracks in the rocks ‘til he vanished into thin water. Peering into the shallow crack, I spotted an unusual pair of perfect shapes, instantly knowing that I was looking at camouflage. Not sure of exactly what it was I made a note of where and checked Lottie hadn’t gone for a swim or slipped on the weed.

You can’t easily tell a four year old you’ve found something until it is obvious – to a four year old – what it is and I was struggling myself. Looking again, I saw two very sharp lined, perfectly formed black oblongs just a few millimetres apart, too close together to be what I thought were two eyes, yet I’d never seen a creature with two pupils in one eye. I found myself staring intensely in the way you do when looking at one of those “What is it?” photos in a book. You know, when it turns out to be an ultra close-up of an elephant’s toenail upside down. Then it dawned on me. We’d found our octopus but not what I’d been expecting. Instead of a fist-sized animal, we were looking straight down into the eyes of the tiniest cephalopod I’d ever seen. Indeed the gap between those two black shapes was the gap between her eyes, she must’ve been no bigger than a coin.

And no sooner had I worked out what we were looking at, so had Lottie too, excitedly pointing the octopus out with a beaming smile on her face as the tiny animal crept out into view.

She was thrilled for I suppose this was something of a rarity; a live, funny sea creature on her very own scale!

We couldn’t resist a little fun interaction and prised off a limpet snack for the octopus. Tiny but full of life we soon had tentacles reaching out for the limpet as well as up onto the ledge where we stood towards our toes. I was curious to see if Lottie would touch the little creature as she’s cleverly wary of the larger ones and it seemed that the size of this one had won her confidence.

She reached out a hand into the water towards the chunk of limpet lying upside down in the sand. As she picked it up a little brown tentacle snaked across and stuck to the limpet meat. She didn’t feel fear but held on and the two of them had a little tug of war until her excitement got the better of her and she let go. However, at the same time so did the octopus. Again, Lottie reached into the water and this time the tiny, flecked tentacle placed a single sucker cup onto her fingertip and the two gently touched for the first time; Lottie drew her hand back, letting out a whelp of delight that only such natural beauty brings.

As the little octopus pulled away taking the limpet with her I wondered if X-Box would ever be good enough.