Acquaintance of an Octopus

‘Today’, I declared, ‘we will see an octopus’. I was almost fully believing it, summoning an octopus with the power of intention. It was during one of our first low tide excursions at Swami’s Cove.

And then there she was. About 6 feet away, on the smooth rock of the high tide-exposed reef. About the size of my hand. Eating a small crab. As we crept closer, she stopped what she was doing with the crab and moved away from it a bit. Feeling that we had distracted her from her meal, I picked up the crab. Tossed it to her. The crab fell practically on top of her. To our amazement she ignored it, instead shooting directly towards us where we stood facing the shore.

The octopus (calling her ‘she’ but don’t really know for sure) stopped right at our feet. She was obviously looking us over. She was erect and looked very interested. Her eyes, protruding from her head, looked from me to Patricia, back to me, to Patricia again. Completely unafraid. Clearly curious. We spoke. We made sounds of incredulous appreciation. The little, beautiful, tan and gold octopus, with a blue spot on each side beneath her sac, examined us for several minutes. Eventually she slithered away into one of the interconnected tide pools and shot off toward the ocean.

That is the story of how we made the acquaintance of an octopus.

Since then we have watched countless videos, documentaries on octopuses, studied every picture we could find. We’ve had more encounters of the cephalopod kind too at the pools at low tide, but none quite like the first.

Only downside to the whole experience: we can’t even think about eating octopus. Any more than we would chow down on a friend.