Robot Claw

And on my last day in San Diego I went on this:

It was great! Truly worth the money and a fun trip!

After a drive around the waterfront for a bit we ended up like this:

At which point I had view like this:

And then after not too long the above view was replace with a bunch of fish-bears!

And when I say a bunch, I mean a whole big bunch!

They moved and growled and did bear-y things!

Ooops! I gave away that I did in fact know that they were not bears at all, but sea lions! They hang out on the top of a mostly-submerged holding tank for baby fish, which is there to attract bigger predator fish into the harbour for fishing. Every now and then the babies are released, which makes for good feeding for these guys.

Out boat/car got so close I felt like I could have reached out and grabbed one.

On the way back we saw this:

Click on it to view it full size. That’s a shot of the dolphin training facility run by the navy. You can even see a dolphin in the photograph. They are trained for security and espionage. I thought at first our host was pulling our legs but it is true, and has been occuring for 50 years!

We also drove/sailed past this:

That big cylinder is something I was quite a fan of as a child. It’s the RP Flip naval research vessel. The cylinder is pumped full of water which then sinks and flips the entire vessel 90 degrees to search as a research platform on the ocean. Here’s a series of shots of it working:

(Like the dolphins) it’s almost 50 years old!

The last thing I saw on my way back from the sea lions was an honest to god SEA MONSTER! Now I’ve seen UFOs, ghosts and possibly even an Esper, but I’ve never had the privilege of seeing a sea monster before, so this was mighty exciting. I’d say it was more like the ‘sea cow’ style of beast (such as those seen in lakes) rather than a true serpent (such as occasionally sighted in the open ocean). I only sighted it briefly, when one of it’s front flippers fins broke the surface before the Zalophus californianus unidentified beast dove down again, but I was lucky to snap a high quality image.

Judge for yourself:

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 8th, 2011 at 4:23 pm and is filed under Family, Tech, The Unknown, Trip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.