Winter Calm

Last week we finally got out on the water to start our pilot study of juvenile Pacific cod winter ecology.

It was a little nerve-racking to use someone else's boat (the University's skiff). We're pretty used to knowing the gear we rely on.

But everything went just fine. We had a cracker day, as you can see.

And as for that part that I have now spoken to more reporters about the project than we've actually seen cod? Well, that speaks to how important the cod collapse is to Kodiak, and also the nature of a pilot study.

Among other things, we're figuring out winter habitat associations for juvenile Pacific cod, about which very little is known. So we go out, and try different things (Friday is our next day out), and over time new knowledge will be created.

It's not always that calm...

Namibia Red

Our time in Kruger and the Kgalagadi Transfrontier parks were oddly private. The campgrounds aren't very interactive places, though of course we did meet some simpático souls.

But the actual event of each day in those parks, the driving around and looking at the wildlife, gives you a one-off experience. No one sees quite the same park as anyone else on any given day. Your own particular experience is driven by your own luck and patience.  In the case of the Galactics, our days tended to be heavy on the bird side of things, and our bouts of watching any particular group of animals, no matter how close or how spectacular, tended to be limited by Eric's six-year-old patience.

But then, after a few days of travel and sidestories here and there along the road, we arrived at our next marquee spot - Sossusvlei in the Namib-Naukluft National Park and Namib Desert.

Here, the experience is much more standardized. It's all about seeing the dunes, especially at sunrise or sunset. The place is a bucketlist kind of place that features on most foreigners' visits to Namibia.

We almost didn't go. We were trying not to do too many things in Namibia, and skipping Sossuvlei would save us a bushel of driving. (See six-year-old patience, above.)

But one of those simpático souls and an old Namibia hand besides told us that we would be absolutely mad to skip Sossusvlei. 

So we went. And we were very glad we did.

This next set of pics is from the morning when we drove out to the dunes at sunrise.  We parked the rig halfway along the four wheel drive track and walked up the nearest dune to that point, thereby missing the bucketlist crowd on the dune ridge at the end of the track.

A dune of our own. What bliss for the Galactics.

Of course, as these pictures were being taken, Alisa was warming up to the most spectacular bout of travel sickness visited on any of us during the whole month. She won't soon forget Sossusvlei.

Yes, we did bog the rig in the deep sand. My fault for losing speed while trying to shift up to second in four wheel low. That might have been the boys' very very viscerally favorite moment of the whole trip. "Dad bogged! Get out and help! It's like playing in the sand, except we have to do it!" A number of other rental rigs were bogged and left in place, their renters nowhere to be seen. We got great amusement out of that.

And I don't have the bird book handy to jog my memory on the identity of that passerine. But it is attempting to drink from the water tap on the truck. Life in the desert. The boys let a puddle run out on the sand and soon had a whole flock at their feet, drinking deep.

More soon.

Sailing the Kalahari

A couple of South Africans we spoke with back in Simon's Town had the same advice to us about seeing the natural of South Africa. Go to the Kalahari, they said. Kruger is great, they explained, but the Kalahari is wilder.

Well, who could resist? Certainly not the Galactics. Soon our initial plan of a two-week overland tour had blown out to a month, with plans to take in the Kalahari and points north in Namibia.

(The three-day trip between Kruger and the Kalahari still resonates with us. Alisa met a woman from Jo'berg recently who said, "You did that with kids? You're brave."

Surely it couldn't have been that risky?)

Our target was the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, which is shared among South Africa, Botswana and Namibia.

A trophy moment for us - a leopard stalking and catching a bird. Here, the pounce...

A quick reaction as the bird tries to get away

And success - we couldn't ID the bird, but you can see it in the leopard's mouth.
We Galactics are quite bloodthirsty in our wildlife viewing - we love seeing
acts of predation.

The Kalahari is much drier than Kruger, but at least in the bit that we saw, it isn't quite desert. More of an arid savannah.

We found less car traffic in the Kgalagadi than we had in Kruger. And there was much less camaraderie in the Kgalagadi. In Kruger, everyone was forever rolling down their windows to share tips for recent sightings. In the Kgalagadi we struggled to get people to talk from their vehicles, and then found ourselves giving up and generally keeping our own counsel. Remarkable how quickly you fall into line with the social norm.

Pale chanting goshawk

Ostrich - much brighter plumage than we've seen in captive birds

Secretary bird - a raptor that has evolved to be a stork

So we spent our days driving the sandy roads of the park, watching the wonders of the world through our truck windows. The megafauna populations of Africa are highly fragmented, hanging on in various scraps of protected habitat that are quite widely separated. Long-term, the prospects for a lot of species aren't that hot. See "southern ground hornbill" and "African wild dog" and "theory of island biogeography". And both rhino species are in a poaching-fueled free fall, with not much further that they can fall. But it is still possible to rent a truck and drive around with your family to see the wonders of southern Africa for yourself. Too cool, and a great example of reveling in the state of the world as you find it.

Springbok

Marshmallow

Gemsbok

Cats. We always look for the cats.

The kids running around the rig to burn off energy in the middle of a long day of sitting and riding. Note that this picnic spot is unfenced. Consider the photo above and wonder about the potential consequences. We were pretty vigilant.

Our redsand campground.

Finally, there's this photo below that Elias got with the point-and-shoot. He was so proud of it, and so keen that it be posted to the blog. I think it encapsulates a lot about how much he and his brother are getting out of this side trip.

The Place You Never Heard Of

Blue wildebeest duking it out

It's the same way over and over.  You arrive in a new country, and start to hear about some place that you've never heard of before. Soon it becomes obvious that it is the place, and that you should really go see it for yourself.

In the case of South Africa, that place is Kruger National Park, in the northeast of the country. Our Rough Guide describes the Kruger experience as "democratic game viewing". And it really is that, at least in terms of democracy for people with the discretionary income to take some time out for game viewing.

We were in the park for seven days and six nights.  The campgrounds are fenced in to keep out the animals with a taste for tourist flesh.  The gates open at six in the morning, and then you go out and spend the day driving around the park, looking at the incredible, iconic macrofauna of Africa.

Again and again, I marveled at how Pleistocene these animals are.  Why did their analogs in North America and Europe and Australia go extinct with the arrival of Homo sapiens, while the African mammalian spectaculars persisted?

And while the rhinos and elephants and great cats and on and on are breath-taking, we also had the diversion of fantastic birding. We spent long days in the truck, and while we might have wearied at times, we never got tired of the experience.

Lilac-breasted roller

Hamerkop

We don't have a high-end telephoto lens, so our ability to fill the frame of these photos speaks to how close we were to the animals.

The boys were completely over the moon, again and again.

We shared almost all of these sightings with other cars. There's a great feeling of camaraderie and information sharing among visitors. Lots of tips get shared between lowered windows of vehicles. At times there are some pretty big conglomerations of viewing vehicles, but there were never so many that we couldn't get a great look ourselves.

We had a memory card meltdown in our point-and-shoot, so I can't share any pics of the camps or our poptop camper.  Those will have to wait for the post on the Kalahari...

Klipspringer. They live in rocky terrain and walk on the tips of their hooves.

Peak moment!

Spotted hyena

Yellow-billed stork

Impala and oxpeckers

We watched this lion mating with a female three times in half an hour, about 30 meters from the road.

Kudu 

Chacma baboon and young

And, while there's plenty more to write about this land trip of ours, I am blessedly limited in internet access, so will leave this post as a somewhat hasty photo dump.

More soon!

Winter's Tale

It's June, and the boys are still swimming.  So far the Cape winter has been toothless.

As far as we know, the only other foreign yacht that is currently in South Africa but still planning on heading up the Atlantic this year is Kestrel, our friends and fellow South Georgia travelers.

The normal routine is to leave South Africa during the summer, so as to beat the hurricane season in the Caribbean.  But being (as far as we know) the last yacht in South Georgia last season, as well as taking six weeks or so for me to catch up on science work once we arrived here, meant that we missed out on any chance of heading up the Atlantic before winter arrived.

But that's ok - I'm nurturing a theory that leaving Cape Town must be a lot like leaving San Francisco, in that it's possible in any month of the year, as long as you're willing to wait for the right weather.

We Galactics, we're very good at waiting for weather.

And even though we might have missed the choice season for leaving South Africa, hanging around has meant that we have set ourselves up for the prime season for overland travel.

While the Cape gets cold and rainy in the winter, in most of South Africa winter is the dry season.  And as the seasonal water bodies disappear, the unbelievable megafauna of southern Africa is forced to congregate at the remaining water holes.  Wildlife viewing gets very good indeed.

Which is why we have rented ourselves a four wheel drive pickup with a poptop camper, and why I am writing this far from Galactic, which remains tied to the dock in Simon's Town while we take in some winter sights in inland southern Africa.  Just now we're in Kruger National Park, on the border with Mozambique and Zimbabwe.  We'll be heading onwards to the Kalahari desert, and then to northern Namibia.

We have never traveled overland from the yacht in the nearly nine years that we've been sailing, but this time we're doing it with a vengeance.  We don't expect to be returning to southern Africa any time soon, after all.  And Eric, at six, is just hitting the point where a trip like this is likely to be fun.

What we've seen so far has fulfilled every boyhood dream that Elias and Eric might have been nurturing about African wildlife.  More about that soon.  For now I'll sign off with this one image that captures how radically our vistas have changed over the last week: