Sea monsters off Port Elizabeth

 

Is there such a thing as sea monsters?  Huge tentacled beasts dragging ships in under the waves, long necked dinosaur like animals who survived millions of years in the deep or scaly monsters with huge teeth so terrifying that Great White Sharks flee in fear?  A morning's hiking around the Cape Recife Nature Reserve in Port Elizabeth nearly had me thinking twice that I have found proof.

Walking along the Algoa Bay side of the reserve I spotted a spiky spine visible amongst the waves.  I started to get excited and snapped a couple of pics before looking at it carefully again.  It seemed to stay in the same spot and rather than moving about it was the waves that washed over it making it look like it was moving.  Turned out to be the remains of one of the many shipwrecks found along this piece of coastline.  Darn! So close.

About 30 minutes later out on the southern side of Cape Recife I saw something very peculiar lying on the beach.  Dark in colour what what looked like a leathery skin and sharp white teeth... Finally I have my proof!  Unfortunately for the Indiana Jones explorer and discoverer in me it turned out to be the dried out remains of a dolphin that washed up on the beach some time before. Darn again! Oh well, I will have to wait a little while longer before I make my big "ground breaking", "world news creating" and "instant fame" discovery. 

Penguins under pressure

Last week I saw a stunning yet very sad picture by Luc Hosten on Facebook.  Two days later I was down at Cape Recife in Port Elizabeth and came across the scene photographed by Luc.  The penguin wasn't in the same position anymore and I didn't want to try and recreate the exact scene anyway, so decided on something similar yet slightly further away.  African Penguins are highly endangered and under immense pressure at the moment with some people giving them only 5 years if nothing major is done soon.  The guys at SAMREC in Cape Recife do an awesome job with limited resources but they desperately need the support of the public and corporates to keep them up and running.

A shell along the shore

Seven of us from work went for a walk along the Sacramento Trail just outside Port Elizabeth the other day.  We were lucky to choose the perfect day with the warm winter sun shining down on us.  I had two cameras hanging around my neck so I was clicking away all the way for both work and pleasure.  As usual my eyes were all over the show looking for stuff to photograph and I spotted the big orange and black shell from miles (ok, not miles but at least 50 meters or so) away.  I don't think my colleagues even saw it but as soon as I got there I was down on my tummy trying to get the best shot.  By the time I was done the rest of the group was just about out of sight, but that is what getting THE photo about.

Sunfish on the beach

Taking a walk along Noordhoek Beach in the Cape I stumbled on a dead sunfish.  This was only a baby, but still something very unusual to see washed up.  Sunfishes are so called because of their habit of drifting at the surface as if basking in the sun.  There are two species of sunfishes found in the waters surrounding Cape Town, the Ocean Sunfish (Mola mola) and the Sharptail Sunfish (Masturus lanceolatus).  Now I'm no sunfish expert so I'm not going to guess which one this was.  Looking at its tail though it could possibly be a Sharptail Sunfish.  Sharptail sunfishes are found only in warmer waters though, thus extremely rare in local waters.  So I'm not guessing.  Sunfish can grow up to 3m in length and a weight of 2 000 kilograms. 

Orange shell on the beach

Not much to say about an orange shell lying on the beach. 

Sea pumpkin on the beach

Before a sea pumpkin becomes a ... well, sea pumpkin, it spends it's life as a spiky sea urchin living in a rock pool or gully somewhere on the coast.  But once the creature inside the shell dies the spikes fall off and only a green "pumpkin" looking shell is left behind.  These sea pumpkins are very popular with people, specially kids, picking up shells.

Jellyfish for lunch

I've posted about Plough Shells before (here and here) but I can never get enough of these very interesting creatures living in the sand below the high and low tide mark.  On a visit to Dana Bay near Mossel Bay in the Western Cape we found literally hundreds of them feeding on a dead jelly fish.

I always feel so sorry for these little guys when a wave pushes the water up the beach and wash them away from their meal.  But they persist and turn right around, heading straight back for more.

This picture is to show the size of the jelly fish and to give you an idea how big the plough shells are.

Plough Shells cleaning out

Talk about licking out your plate when you done.  A couple of Plough Shells cleaning out a mussle shell dropped on the beach by a Black Oyster Catcher.