Thursday, April 18, 2013

Capitola: the Ocean

As I mentioned, we did not luck out with good surf during our weekend in Capitola and Santa Cruz.

But we did spend a fair amount of time near the ocean, and here is the best reward for that time spent:

(I don't think I've posted a video before...check it out here for better quality, or if the embedded video doesn't play.)


This sea otter was in mussel heaven--he had found a gold mine of mussels, and we watched for about 30 minutes as he pried each one off the rocks, dove down to grab a cracking rock from the ocean bottom, and whacked the mussel against the rock balanced on his chest to get to the meat.  It was so cool to watch up close (especially for W, who thought otters were akin to unicorns the first time he visited Monterey--we had trouble spotting any!)

We laughed that his head always tipped back into the water when he was whacking the mussel against the rock.

We haven't had good luck the last several times we've tried to bodysurf, but hopefully we'll catch better waves the next couple times we try.


It was still a beautiful weekend to be by the ocean!

California Poppies

3 comments:

  1. What a cool sea otter vid! He's so cute!! Thanks for posting :)

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  2. Where did you get this amazing close-up view of the performing sea otter? Very nice.

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  3. He looks much more graceful and civilized when eating mussels than we do!

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