Brief encounter

8 October

We decided to set this day aside for otter spotting, especially after our morning walk when Janet found prints on the beach leading to a little stream surrounded by dense reed beds – the prints hadn’t been washed away by the high tide, so we were able to calculate that we had only missed the otter by an hour or so (groan!), and so he was presumably in bed in the reeds for the day and would come out later (yay!). We’d need to be back in the evening to wait him out.

In the meantime we visited the Kommetjie lighthouse and Windmill Beach near Simonstown as these were reputed otter spots, but no luck at either of them. We lunched on bunny chow at the idiosyncratic MIG-21 cafe, with a hippie-steampunk themed interior and owner. Next stop was meant to be Cape Point NP for a hike and hopefully wildlife, but the queue of cars for the gate snaked all the way down the road and we gave it up. At Soetwater Resort we saw no sign of otters but a Small Grey Mongoose crossed the road in front of us. That looked to be our mammal count of the day.

Ah-ha! Except that our otter watch came up trumps! Okay, not in a very satisfying way. It had been raining on and off all day, and now it rained on us as we lurked in the dunes watching the pool. Boy it was cold. And wet, as noted. And breezy too. Basically damn uncomfortable. It had just stopped raining when the otter popped down to the pool for 15 seconds in the half-dark, then turned and trotted back. Of course because of the rain my camera was still in the backpack. We waited on until it was pitch dark, but that 15 seconds was all we got. One for the checklist, really – we shall just have to hope for more luck tomorrow. Home-cooked spaghetti with a garlic and tomato sauce for dinner, always nice.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, October 28th, 2017 at 7:05 pm and is filed under South Africa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.