here's a perfect example of me using skullblog to chronicle my life but not necessarily post it the day it the day i wrote it. you see, last night we went on the grunion run and it lasted until after midnight but i felt it was more appropriate to still enter it for saturday instead of sunday. we're volunteering to be grunion greeters and that's how they want us to report it as well. (if the run lasts past midnight, use the date before midnight.) i drove and twiddle thumbs and her little sister and nopalita went along too. we went to cabrillo beach in san pedro. i had never been there before but when i was signing up to volunteer at grunion.org and was selecting a beach, i decided to pick one close by in los angeles county that no one had signed up for yet. (orange county beaches have rules that require a different method of registering and i didn't feel like bothering with it right now.) naturally, i wouldn't have picked it if i wasn't first able to find directions to it on the net. as i told people that i would be doing this, i got sillier and sillier. i said i would have a sign "welcome grunions to los angeles" and have thousands of tiny leis. i even told this to the professor coordinating the volunteer effort. she loved the idea and laughed too. that did it for me. i had to make a sign and take pictures. i didn't bother arranging tiny leis but i almost brought a guitar for the photo op.

it wasn't the biggest run but there were still grunion as far as the eyes could see

we arrived shortly before 11pm, just after high tide. i wasn't expecting to see many grunion, if any. when we got there, there were just a few grunion on the beach. they must've been the scouts because very quickly, maybe 5-10 minutes later, there were many of them. it's kinda amazing how nature coordinates such things. i don't know if there's a bar the grunion hang out at and they remind each other to spawn next weekend. somehow they have their shit together. i was glad that it was such a great run. so many of them flopping on the sand and even in the rocky section of the beach. there's a grunion run scale and the highest is a 5, which means there are so many grunion that you can barely even see sand between them. the most concentrated portion of grunion were about 4-5 and it gradually waned but the run was about a couple hundred feet in length (i'm bad with distance) and the thickness was about 7-10 feet in the 4-5 section down to only 1 foot or sporadic in the least populated section. we did help out a few grunion that were or seemed to be stuck by rocks, kelp, and a waning tide. we covered several egg sites that were open as we wanted to give them a better chance against predators. i think my set of photos on flickr tell a better story.