How to count the bubbles on sea spaghetti: A tidal pool adventure with Coastal Carol

WELLS, Maine — Carol Steingart extends a single strand of knotted wrack from the glistening “sea spaghetti” that gloms to a rock on Middle Beach in Kennebunk.

Here’s how you can tell how long this seaweed has been attached to this rock, she says, gently clamping the base of the brown ribbon between her thumb and pointer finger.

“You count the bubbles,” she says. “You run your fingers up to the first bubble. That’s year zero because it takes a while for it to establish itself on the rock and start to grow.”

She slides her fingers along the strand, making her way from bubble to bubble until she reaches the end. She counts four full bubbles and the budding of a fifth.

“This is a five-year plant,” she determines.

Think about that, she says. All of this knotted wrack – this “sea spaghetti,” as it also is called – has clung mightily to this rock, withstanding the tide rolling in and rolling out, with varying degrees of force, every day for five years.

“This is not calm, easy water,” she said, referring to the Atlantic rolling farther down the beach. “This is wave action. And it’s still here.”

Moments earlier, Steingart had dipped her hands into a small tidal pool and pulled out a handful of Irish moss. Moments later, she gingerly picked through some seaweed and found a few common periwinkle snails.

This is what Steingart does. Through her business, Coast Encounters in Wells, she leads small groups on tours of tidal pools at beaches between the Kennebunks and Ogunquit. During these tours, groups come across all sorts of sea life: scuds, isopods, springtails, barnacles, crabs, limpets, snails, stars, sponges, weeds, mosses, crusts, baby lobsters, and more.

“Baby lobsters are inland a bit because if they were out in the deeper waters, they would just get eaten by predators,” Steingart said. “So they come in and hunker down under rocks in the shallows.”

Steingart’s enthusiasm for these critters and algae is contagious — and, it seems, inexhaustible. When she met a Coast Star reporter at Middle Beach for an interview in the midmorning of Thursday, Aug. 3, she had already been up for hours because she led a tidal-pool tour that started in Kennebunkport at 5:30 a.m. She arrived for the interview in a van that had TYDPUL on its license plate.

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If you grew up in the area and attended local schools, you might have crossed paths with Steingart. You may remember her as “Coastal Carol,” the nickname she goes by. Steingart has been presenting hands-on, interactive lessons about local sea life in classrooms for decades, ever since her daughter, who’s now in her 30s, attended the second grade in the ’90s.

She officially established Coast Encounters and started offering tours a little more than ten years ago, she said.

For Steingart, the classroom visits and the tours of local tidal pools go back to the first time she ever had a “coast encounter” as a student at the University of New Hampshire in the 1970s. Steingart enrolled in a five-credit course that took her to the Shoals Marine Laboratory, six miles off the Portsmouth shore, for a month.

“I’m a kid from Long Island, New York,” she said. “We had sandy beaches and ugly crabs and some clams, nothing more than that. So, when I went out there, to the Shoals Marine Lab, I found this diverse ecosystem, just living quietly under the rocks. I just got fascinated by this life that I had never even explored before. It was just really intriguing and fun and exciting.”

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And now it’s intriguing and fun and exciting for the people she takes on tours, as well.

And safe. Safety is the top priority during the tours, according to Steingart. She provides water shoes, in every size, for those who take her tours, so that they will have strong and flexible footwear as they navigate the ragged and slippery terrain surrounding tide pools. She also advises customers that they need to have strong balance to participate in the tours, which she describes as “low and slow,” given the bending and deliberate pace involved.

“This is not a beach walk,” she said. “It’s not flat and sandy. All the rocks are covered in slippery seaweed. Balance is a key issue for you to navigate safely. We also do a lot of squatting, bending over, crouching down, and peeling back rocks.”

Steingart offers tours from mid-May through mid-October.

Whether in a classroom or in a tidal pool, the hands-on learning is what makes the difference, Steingart said.

“If you can hold a live creature in your hand – for example, a sea urchin – and you can feel it moving in your hand, that’s the best way to learn and to retain that experience,” she said.

Steingart said Coast Encounters offers a unique experience in Maine, as she has not come across anything similar when it comes to what her business offers. She realized she was filling a niche when once she witnessed children pulling legs off crabs and throwing them back into the water, as well as walking barefoot on rocks that had sharp barnacles on them.

She said the tours she offers are about more than having an adventure and a truly Maine experience. They’re also about exploring sea animals and algae in a “sustainable and respectful way.”

“We catch them, we explore them in our hands, and we release them,” she said. “And then we put their home back exactly the way we found them.”

Tours are offered to children for $75, and to adults for $80. Children must be at least 7 years old to join a tour. To schedule a tour, either visit the Coast Encounters website or call Steingart at (207) 831-4436.

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Coastal Carol’s Coast Encounters: A tidal pool adventure