Endless miles of hiking trails wind along the bay and beaches, offering one dramatic view after another, facilitating all this watching. If you choose the beach, beware. Such tempestuous forces of nature might drive you indoors. Check out the University of California, Davis, Bodega Marine Laboratory, off Westside Road. From 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Fridays, the world of 90 graduate students studying coastal botany is open to the public.
Tours are an hour long and are tailored to the docents' interests.
Our docent, Charles Greene, has a macabre bent. He shows us octopi housed in tanks with concrete blocks across their tops to keep the creatures inside. An assistant feeding them one day was grabbed up off the ground by a long tentacle, he said. The other tanks hold gentler creatures - small fish, starfish and sea urchins, one of which we are invited to hold, its prickly spines tickling our palms as it crawls from hand to hand. Then we're shown the hybrid lobster, created in the lab.