… currents and tides ….

One has to understand the way of tides and the movement of currents to get around. If you look across to one point on a near island’s shore, it might be easy or impossible to get there, depending on whether the tide is in your favor or opposing. If the tide is going out, and running in conjunction with an outwardly-moving current, you could get pulled out into open water, beyond the grips of any other power. Four hours later when the tides running in again, you can scoot across to the same point pretty as you please.
So there are right times and wrong times for everything. Sometimes you just have to wait.
Starfish sleep most of the time. You can only get a good three or four hours of alertness out of them any one day, and part of that they’re goofing around, yelling and yodeling and blowing bubbles, as I’m sure you have remarked on your own. You can’t just start lecturing them any old time, and it has to be something they’re interested in, after all. It takes a few tests to find out what it is they’re about, what kind of temperament they have, and eventually you can determine the things they need to learn and unlearn, and the best way to relate. Sometimes you’ll just have a conversation like this:
“John Cusack in High Fidelity?”
“No, Ben Stiller after the tragedy in Zoolander.”
“Oh, so sorry …” You see? And now you know how to take it from there.
Sometimes you find one that is quite magnificent, but isn’t doing things in the ordinary pattern, and perhaps if you indicate the thing that’s lacking, it would do better, not founder so much, yet you sense it knows what it’s doing, if not absolutely deliberately, there’s some reason it isn’t going the usual way. So you might drop the most subtle of hints and see what happens. Maybe it’ll go your way, or maybe do something more interesting.
I did really think there was something about starfish being in the shoreline environment, and so I’d take the best of them for “walks,” bring them ashore and set them in the water for a few hours while I tried out my land-legs and investigated the myriad things there were to be found around land. The island closest to the cages had been inhabited, but was abandoned. There were buildings covered with lichens and an orchard where I could find fruits of all sorts, in season. I brought a net to haul back all the stuff I found, some to look at, some to work with my hands, some to eat. I could be fascinated just looking at land things for tide after tide. And then one day I saw someone there.