Pelicans

The blue buoys in the background are markers for an oyster farm

Here is a set of images I took nearly three years ago now of a pair of pelicans coming in to land. My wife and I were in a small boat off the coast of Swakopmund, Namibia and the pelicans knew that if they came and said hello they would be rewarded with a few choice mackerel. Taken together the three images give a great sense of the grace and control these birds have as they come in to land, but, we almost missed the opportunity all together....

The town of Swakopmund, (one of my favourite place names of all time, right up there with Saqsayhuaman and Fingringhoe) can be found about half way up Namibia's long Atlantic coast line almost directly west of the capital Windhoek. It's a curious little town, a bit like, I imagine, stepping back into 1970s East Germany. Not in a Stasi, Eastern Bloc kind of way but in a way that brought to mind what Germany might have been like without the burden of mass industry and high technology. You see, during the Scramble for Africa we got South Africa, Egypt, the Sudan and others; Belgium got what is now the DRC; the French got much of the north west of the continent and Germany got a portion down in the south west of Africa which they called, with typical Teutonic imagination, German South West Africa, now known as Namibia. The result of this was a little slice of Bavaria in the desert on the opposite side of the world.

Streets in Swakopmund have names like Nord Ring, Heuschneider and Mittel Straße and it couldn't be easier to find a cold, European style beer and a stein to drink it out of. Nationally, one third of white Namibians speak German and this proportion is thought to be higher still in Swakopmund. So, pretty German, then. It was for this reason that we were rather worried that we were going to miss our boat trip as Germans don't tend to be keen on tardyness. You see, we were under the impression that we were going to be picked up from our awesome accommodation and taken the 20 miles or so down to Walvis Bay where the trip began; but more than 20 minutes after we expected to be picked up we found out that we were going to have to make our own way there and average a mile per minute in the process. We were on a driving holiday, doing a lap of Namibia and so we had our own wheels but this was still less than ideal. We covered thousands of kilometres on that holiday and more than 90% of it was on gravel roads; luckily this little stretch was 100% lovely black top.

With Sue doing her best Jensen Button impression we made it. Just. But it cost us some light ribbing from the boat load of middle aged German tourists that seemed to punctuate our way around the country, Namibia being quite a popular tourist destination for our Germanic cousins. The main point of the trip was to see the enormous Cape Cross seal colony and, if we were lucky, dolphins; we knew the pelicans would be there but we didn't give them much thought. As we saw them come gliding into view though, through the early morning mist over a perfectly still Atlantic, they had an undeniable majesty to them that let me easily capture a great little series of images.

Another highlight was when a, presumably semi-tame and well rehearsed, male seal climbed up the back of the boat and onto the deck. Now, we were not on a large boat, she was only about 20 feet from bow to stern so to have a 9 foot seal weighing a third of a ton lumbering about was, I admit, a little disquieting. All of a suddenall the human cargo had to pin themselves to the side railings to give this behemoth room to, well, generally stink the place up. If I'm honest, my lasting impression of this encounter nearly three years on, once you've got used to the enormous size and very pointy looking teeth, is that seals really, really stink of fish. I guess he was quite cute in his own way, and he certainly seemed to appreciate his free breakfast.

The last picture I'm going to show you from this trip was one I caught on the fly, so to speak. It still cracks me up every time I see it. I would say that this shows pelicans looking slightly less graceful than in the previous photos and if you look carefully you can just about see a fish below it's beak that had been thrown for it to catch.