As I’m brushing my teeth this morning, I notice something splashing water along the shoreline.  With the binoculars I discover that it’s the mergansers I’ve heard quacking every day, but never could find.  So, I drop everything and suit up as quickly as I can, hoping to finally get a shot of them.

I paddled as stealthily as I could, but momma merganser immediately got her brood up on shore behind a rock while she stood absolutely still, keeping her eye on me, and hoping I hadn’t spotted them.

I crept along the rocky shore trying to get a better shot.  I found a spot where I could wedge myself among the rocks, so that the current wouldn’t keep turning me around, and waited for momma to make her move.  I took shot after shot, each one a duplicate of the previous shot, since she never moved a muscle, still staring me down.  Then, pandemonium broke out, as she herded her crew down to the water, and I struggled to get my kayak turned around.

When I pushed against the rocks with my paddle, the kayak wouldn’t budge.  My first thought was that my skeg was stuck in a crevice.  The skeg, however, was not the problem.  While I had been patiently waiting for the mergansers to come out of hiding, the tide had gone down just enough to leave me high and dry.   I scooted forward and stepped out onto the rocks to get my weight off the kayak.  That’s when I discovered I’d been pivoting on a pinnacle rock.  Once off the rock, I was able to get back in and try to catch up with the mergansers.  By now, they were paddling like crazy, probably laughing like crazy, and getting farther and farther away.

Oh, well.  You win some, you lose some.  On the bright side, I didn’t wind up with a hole in the bottom of my kayak.

I never caught up with the mergansers, but this kingfisher was nice enough to let me take his picture.

And, lucky for me, this very laid-back loon wasn’t camera-shy at all.

He was such a ham, he even waved.