Week 6 trip to coast

2/11-2/14 2008
On this trip, we took a new road to the coast. On the map, it is labeled C26, but widely known as the Khomas-Hochland road. The “C” part means it is not paved (B is for tar-road). Half of the drive – by distance, and by far the majority by time – was through mountainous territory with sinuous roads, rather washboard, and periodically cut through by intermittent rivers. We drove much of it at 30 kph. Cattle and horses along the way indicate that the area is grazed, although the soil is so thin that rocks show through everywhere, in lines suggesting sedimentary layers turned on end. It was a fantastic drive for charismatic megafauna: when we stopped to look at a few oryx (whose dramatic coloring makes them stand out), we also startled a dozen kudu, totally invisible in their lightly banded brown coats until they moved. Charismatic birds included some really large and pied (black and white) ones – we’re marking dates and places in our bird book when we can identify species, and we added more than a half dozen on this trip.
The road emerges from the mountains almost directly into Namib-Naukluft park, where oryx, springbok, ostriches and zebras congregated in remarkable numbers on the eastern edge, which was beginning to green from recent rain. We saw Welwitschia mirabilis for the first time in the wild, looking just as scraggly and other-worldly as in the UW greenhouse. Apparently, its two leaves can grow for a millennium.
We camped for 3 nights around The Salt Company, making forays there each day to begin understanding how the water moves among the ponds and which species are present. We were surprised that the inlet canal, where seawater is first pumped, had no clams, mussels, or barnacles – we wondered if the pump was fatal to larvae, or if the flamingos were dancing them to death, but then learned that the canal periodically dries out when the pump is turned off. In any case, many species that appear not to be present in the inlet to the oyster salt pond, suddenly appear in the pond: barnacles on the rocks and floats, a reddish bryozoan, isopods in the Gracilaria, under rocks, and sometimes just swimming openly. We tentatively identified the isopods as Paridotea fucicola [later: nope – the uropod ramus dimensions became clearer with a better ‘scope], but it wasn’t easy without a dissecting kit or dissecting microscope: I had to pull out the mouthparts and uropods by hand and try to look at them under the compound ‘scope that Mr Klein uses to observe oyster larvae.

Our camping trip was a bit of a shake-down: we spent the first night at a commercial campground, which is good since the propane canisters recommended for our Bleuet stove didn’t actually fit, and we used the kitchen stoves available at the campground instead. On our second night, we opened cans of mutton and TVP curry with a knife (stainless steel beats aluminum) because our mess kit includes a cork/bottle opener but no can opener. By the third night, we felt that we were settling into more of a routine. All 3 of us pack into the back of the Combi to sleep even though it’s 4” too short for Alan (he gets the spot where one of the seat backs folds down.

During our stay, the winds began blowing from the SW for the first time in weeks: if this holds, upwelling should resume and the water temperatures cool and become less stressful for aquaculture.