Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?

Our Stories

We had a mission for our rock pool ramble today! The mission was to find as many Sponge Bob Square Pants characters as we possibly could.

The children were super excited to take on this task and finding the first character “Mr Krabs” was quite easy! Before we even made it out to the rock pools one of the campers spotted a crab scurrying across the sand.

Our next character wasn’t going to be as easy, we were on the hunt for “Patrick Star” the sea star. Usually the children find it quite hard to find Patrick but the staff know where to look. The sea stars camouflage quite well being a dark green speckled colour. After a long few minutes one of the campers spotted a baby sea star! They were so excited, over the moon! Once we spotted one more started to show up and we found hundreds of tiny sea stars.

Next was the famous “Sponge Bob” himself, now usually we don’t find many of these in the pools at all so we decided to head back towards the sand bank where they seem to wash up and dry out. The staff thought this one would take a little longer than the others but with 16 eyes looking he was spotted very easily. Although he was rock hard and smelly we gave the campers a little tip to pop him back in the water to absorb some water and once again turn him back into the sea sponge he once was.

The last character on the list was to find “Squidward” the squid. Being a squid there was no chance we would find a live one around, but we compromised and started our search for a close cousin of the squid – the cuttle, these are easily found washed up on the shore as a white chalky round object. This is the cuttle back bone, once they die in the ocean all of their flesh is eaten away and left with the hard backbone.

The cuttle wasn’t going to be hard to find and once we walked around the heads to the open ocean side of the bluff where the cuttle tend to blow in with the waves and wind. We ended up collecting a huge pile of cuttle backbone and left them under the stairs for someone else to enjoy.

In the words of Sponge Bob himself: “What could be better than serving up smiles?”

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Last year, more than 1,400 children were inspired, had fun and accessed new opportunities through our children’s programs. As Cottage by the Sea programs receive no government funding, we rely on the generosity of corporate sponsors, individual donations and contributions.

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