Shetland - Day 2

After breakfast at my favorite restaurant, our guide for the day picked us up at our hotel. 

Gary, our otter guide, was a nice fella, although a little quiet for my tastes. I like chatty guides <s>. But he was very knowledgeable, and willing, if not eager, to answer any questions.

We drove all the way up the island and sat near one of the ferry terminals for a long time.

Gobbling up cars

The otters, who are actually river otters, allegedly hang out there. Since they are fresh water creatures, they’ve had to adopt to living mostly in salt water. They’ve done this by sticking close to fresh water and rinsing their fur off every day. Since there was a fresh water source that flowed into the North Sea near the ferry, Gary said it was the spot most likely to produce an otter or two.

We waited around for a looooong time, but no otters appeared. 

Abandoned but still pretty 

a very loooong time

So we drove for another bit and ditched the car. Then we went on what seemed like a very, very long walk, across a sheep pasture that skirted the sea.

It was pretty cool, mostly because it’s lambing season. We actually saw a lamb that couldn’t have been over two or three hours old, just trying to figure out how to get his little wobbly legs to straighten out so he could have a meal.

Twins!!

The pasture was mostly made of heather, which sits atop peat, which can be up to five meters deep. It was spongy, and wet, and pretty uneven, but I brought my walking sticks to keep me upright, a position I want to maintain as much as possible while in Scotland.

After about three hours, Carolyn spotted an otter! Yeah! We watched him for a total of one minute, then he disappeared, never to be seen again.

I spy with my little eye

We were atop a cliff, and there was a wide swath of stones between us and the water, making the otter at least 100 yards from us. So I’m confident it was an otter, but it looked like a furry snake slithering through the water, not at all like the cute little guys at Monterrey Bay Aquarium.

We kept walking until we got to the end of the island, continuing to strike out. We did see this cool piece of wood that Carolyn decided was a petrified old viking ship mast.

Gary suggested we return to the car and go back to the ferry. There was a chance the otters had returned to that area, and if we stood there and waited for an hour or two, we’d probably see another.

This is what we hoped to see..The elusive river otter.

It turns out that five hours of tramping around a soggy sheep pasture looking for otters is Carolyn’s limit. She suggested we skip the ferry to go directly to the hotel for a beer and dinner.

Gary was quite surprised, seemingly willing to hang around until dark, but his drive to find otters is obviously much greater than ours. Good thing, I suppose, since that’s his job.

He took us home a different way, letting us see a side of the mainland we’ve not been to. The views were even better on this side, and we got some breathtaking views of the sea.

Now we’ve had our dinner, and I expect to fall asleep super early. Otter hunting is tiring!

SXM and CDN