Ocean World Aquarium - Crescent City, CA - Travel Blog Photo Journal

My husband, Jon, and I recently took a day trip to Crescent City, CA for our fifteenth anniversary and while we were there, we visited the Ocean World Aquarium. It’s a small aquarium with a good-sized gift shop that offers guided tours of their tide pools and tanks along with a seal and sea lion presentation and an opportunity to pet a shark.

The first stop on the guided tour is Ocean World’s interactive tide pools. These are filled with various species of star fish, anemones, and a gumboot chiton. Ochre seastars were the most abundant. They are the orange and purple seastars shown in the photo above.

This is what the underside of a bat star looks like. The top of a bat star is shown in the photo at the top of this page. They are so vibrant!

In these photos, you can see one of Ocean World’s giant green anemonies, some ochre stars, and a bat star.

Other species of star fish we saw during this portion of the tour included the leather star and blood star, which are both shown in the section of photos above.

The aquarium is a barge ship that has been docked on land with tanks built around it. When you descend into the bottom of the boat, you can look out of the windows into the tanks. The first tank has leopard sharks, bat rays, and massive sturgeon.

A separate tank offers views of playful seals and sea lions racing through the water.

The third tank hosts rockfish, dungeness crab, and a few other shy species that were hiding out when we were there.

After ascending from the bottom of the boat, guests are led through an exhibit where you can pet a leopard shark. It was Bruce the shark’s turn when we were there, and he playfully interacted with all of the visitors in our group. We took advantage of a photo op while we enjoyed this exhibit. (There are multiple opportunities for photos throughout the tour.)

The last stop on the guided tour is a platform where you can learn about the aquarium’s seal and sea lion species. Our tour guide worked with several different animals during this presentation to showcase their intelligence and playfulness while teaching us about their species. One of the things I learned during this portion of the tour was that fur seals have super dense fur - about 300,000 hairs per square inch!

The tour concludes with another opportunity to browse Ocean World’s gift shop, which is filled with fun souvenirs and clothing items. We chose some hoodies to remember our day, as well as some stickers for my wall photo collage.

Ocean World would make a great stop for families traveling through on their vacations or for folks who are in the area to see the redwoods. Jon and I thoroughly enjoyed the time we spent there.