Wednesday 18 April 2018

Wednesday 18 April 2018 Cuttagee Lake

L&I headed off down to Little Cuttagee to get in a quick paddle before the forecast fffing wind kicked in - when are we going to get our lovely, calm, sunny autumn back???
Anyway, enough whingeing.

We had a lovely paddle, poodling along. Unfortunately, I forgot the camera - again and so can only report that we saw lots of bird life:

Black swans
Pelicans
Sea Eagle
Wedge Tailed Eagle
Little Black Cormorant
Little Pied Cormorant
White Faced Heron
Great Egret
Sacred Ibis
Kingfisher
Masked Lapwings
A couple of different types of ducks (every jumpy, probably refugees from Victoria!)
Either a Black or Australasian Bittern near Peg's Shed (hard to tell, camouflaged in the tree it looked striated like and Australasian, but when it flew off it seemed to have a very dark bark and wings, hence the Black)
And as we were driving off after loading the boats, a quail ran across the track.

And as for the fish, boy were they a jumpin! Big (dinner sized ones) silver ones leaping out of the water left, right and centre, especially in Little Cuttagee.

Crossing over from Blockhead's Bay we saw the biggest jelly fish we've ever seen on any of our paddles and the first and only one we have ever seen in Cuttagee. Though Andy, who called in for a coffee after we got back says that he has seen them in Cuttagee before.

There must have been some big hatchings recently. Cruising slowly back around the eastern edge of Little Cuttagee I paddled through huge schools of tiny, less than one centimetre fish and masses and masses of approx 3 to 4cm long transparent shrimpy things. Don't know whether they were indeed shrimpy things or baby prawns but it was like paddling through a soup of them. Then there were schools of different sized fish, grading up from the tiny ones up through the 3cm, 6cm to 10cm. The bigger the fish, the smaller the school. It was entrancing.

We didn't go very far but were out on the water for a little over 2 1/4 hours, there was so much to look at and watch. Fantastic.

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