Colt State Park, Spring Tide!

Colt State Park in beautiful Bristol has a great salt marsh and salt pond to take students to explore in. There is ample marsh to walk through (and even a single path from use that people are able to stick to as to not disrupt the rest of the marsh) as well as plenty of shallow water to use seine nets, dip nets, viewers, and waders in.

However, this shallow salt pond isn't so shallow during a spring tide! Spring tides are extremely high high tides and low low tides, and occur due to the cycle of the moon around the earth. Gravity pulls the water on the earth toward the moon, so the highest of the high tides will coincide with when a full moon is visible at night. In Rhode Island, this timing happened to be yesterday.

We put our 7th grade students from the Community Preparatory School into rubber boots, gave them all sorts of equipment to explore the water with, and when they got in the water at 9 am (high tide was at about 7:45) it was up to the rim of their boots! Luckily, yesterday was more like a summer day than a late September day, so students wound up trudging through the water up to their knees -- with the brackish water spilling in right over the top of their boots! They had a great attitude, and their rewards were the bountiful green and fiddler crabs they found, as well as the shrimp, silversides, and killifish they scooped up in the seine net.

Many thanks to Richard Benjamin, who often runs sunset series "Taking better Bay photographs" with us, who took the picture above. To find out about upcoming sunset series trips, visit http://www.savebay.org/education_sunsetseries.asp

And for information on the photographer visit http://www.providenceri.com/richardbenjamin/richben.html