Even wetter

The Safari set off full of hope that the weather would be better than yesterday's. It wasn't long before we realised we were probably going to get wet!

Our intention was to head over to the South-side and watch the rising tide and see what, if anything, got washed off.

Its only 200 yards from the car park to the 'shelter' - we were pretty wet by the time we got under 'cover'. The strong wnd made scoping tricky and even holdiing the bins against one of the sturdy uprights still didn't totally solve the severe wobble.

Very little was out on the marsh, a couple of Little Egrets, two Oystercatchers, two Lapwings and a Redshank.

The rain lashed down again and poor Frank couldn't find anywhere to shelter, his ears were blowing around like rags in the gusty wind and the rain drove in under the roof through the very 'open to the elements' sides.

Eventually he had to stand up and have a good old shake

After a little while the rain eased and we set off along the embankment to have a look at the next set of pools - we didn't get that far! With another low cloud drifting in at speed we could see the rain falling in the opposite side of the river, time for a swift about-turn!

A Skylark was just about audible above the noise of the wind singing over the marsh and a Blackbird started singing from deep in the hedge behind us...We didn't reach the shelter (not that it would have offered much respite) - drenched!!! We went straight back to the relative comfort of the Land Rover and on reaching the car park flushed a Ringer Plover which must have been resting unseen on the gravel.
Once in the Land Rover we realised how wet we were - very!!! Pressing the 'go' pedal meant the water in our sock was forced into a puddle inside the heel of our boot - yuk and our wet trousers made a pool on the seat, a drawback of waterproof seat covers...double yuk.

We sat out a couple more downpours and waited to see if it was going to brighten up - it didn't look like it was going to improve so we gave up on his site for our target species and drove a few more miles to another.

No sign of our target species here either, although some recently lifted crops had left gound conditions looking good for them...have to come back in better weather conditions.
Not the best of safaris.

Where to next? Hopefully the continuing blow might bring something within range at Patch 2 during the week.

In the meantime let us know how wet you can get in your outback.