Whales, magnificent huge animals one could say, but one could also say ocean, magnificent immense pond… This is roughly how I felt last weekend.
Friday after work, Werner and I left in Tim’s bakkie towards the De Hoop nature Reserve for a “welcome to the whales weekend”. The reserve has organised some leading whale researchert to come and give presentations and talks about various aspects of cetacean research and combined the whole thing into a nice weekend with wine tastings… cool!
The weather forecast is literally crap, but who cares, we camp… Tim has borrowed us his HUGE tent. All set up we go for the informal dinner with the experts and wine matching. A success, the food is super nice and the whine matching terrific, well, rather on the bigger side of filling a glass :), by the end of the dinner, we’ve met couple of cool people, some QGIS users :) and we have an infinity of empty glasses between us.
The night is calm, and after some picture experiment we go to rest, many whales are waiting for us the next day… or not…
The Saturday morning is a mix of eating, going back to bed because it is raining, read, wait and finally out… it stopped rain we go to the beach, an amazing place, I love oceans. We walk up and down the coast for couple of hours looking at the most stunning landscape and some cool animals, but unfortunately no southern right whale in sight. After our solitaire trip, we join with the park rangers and 20 other people for a guided walk about the ecosystem of De Hoop and the Southern right whale.
In the evening we have a dinner and presentation where between each course there is a speech. The first is a very interesting presentations on cetacean research in general, and the second (given by Ryan – the QGIS user) an amazing view on Killer-whales on Marios Islands.
Couple of glasses of wine make us forget the storm outside, and when we get to the tent we’ve some sidious work to do :) but hey, it was still there… eventully we decide that we won’t be able to fix the ten any better than we did and as long as we are inside it wont fly away. and so it was, two broken poles and many attach points ripped, but the next morning we’re still almost dry :) and ready for some more exploring of De Hoop.
Again no whales (well it must be said that the season has just started and its apex should be in august, where whales are just about everywhere in the bay), but many other very cool sights, definetly a very very nice place.