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Point Defiance Marina Open Foul
Sat, Mar 14
|The "L" shaped dock next to the ferry
Dock of the Month Club Meeting Day for March
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Sat, Mar 14
|The "L" shaped dock next to the ferry
Dock of the Month Club Meeting Day for March
Dock of the Month Club presents
October belongs to the docks.
A worldwide iNaturalist bioblitz for the marine life living on and around floating docks, plus a ridiculous number of local dock-fouling meetups around Puget Sound.
Why Docktober?
By October, the big daytime low tides of summer are winding down and casual tidepooling gets a lot less cooperative. The marine life is still there. You just have to change where you look.
Floating docks stay accessible through the fall, and underneath them is a whole vertical tidepool: hydroids, bryozoans, tunicates, anemones, worms, crabs, sea stars, algae, nudibranchs and whatever else has moved in.
If this is new territory, start with Dock Fouling 101.
The actual event
The meetups are fun, but the iNaturalist project is the heart of this thing. To participate in the bioblitz, join the Docktober 2026 project on iNaturalist and upload your qualifying observations during October.
You absolutely can come to a meetup without joining the project. You just will not be counted as a bioblitz participant unless you join it.
Puget Sound, California, England, Japan, wherever. If it floats and marine life is living on or around it, it counts.
This is not a nudibranch contest. Tunicates count. Worms count. Hydroids count. The alarming little thing you cannot identify counts.
Photograph what you find and upload the observation. Join the project so those observations can become part of Docktober.
A note from the engine room: the project filter is a little wonky and will need manual cleanup as we go. It may become a game of observational whack-a-mole. If a qualifying observation does not appear immediately, do not panic.
Hosted by Dock of the Month Club
Dock of the Month Club meets year-round to explore floating docks. For Docktober, club members have offered to host at different sites throughout the month, so there will be a whole series of chances to come look with other people around Puget Sound.
Those events are our local contribution to a much bigger bioblitz. You do not have to attend an organized meetup to participate, and you do not have to live in Washington.
No experience is required. Bring a camera or phone, something comfortable to lie or kneel on, and clothes that can get damp and docky.
Puget Sound meetup schedule: view the meetup schedule →
Yes, there is loot
At the end of Docktober, the participant with the most qualifying observations in the project wins a Tidaldex. They are available for different regions, so the winner can choose the one they want.
There is one extremely specific eligibility rule.
Otherwise this becomes less of a contest and more of an administrative inevitability.
Prime directive
Dock fouling is about noticing the community, not rearranging it. Photograph animals where you find them and do not detach, relocate or put them into containers for a better look. If you find a nudibranch, the Nature Lookings handling guide explains why its exact little patch of dock may matter more than it seems.
Docktober 2026
Hosted by Dock of the Month Club · Open to dock lookers everywhere.