Monday, September 1, 2008

The elusive jaguar by Jessica Spinelli



We were nearing mile 10.5 and energy reserves were still relatively high - considering we had just trekked 6 miles on soft sand. Suddenly Lynne noticed something moving along the beach in the distance.
“Is that a dog?” she asked aloud, not wanted to raise any false hopes.
“A log?” Rich asked, confused.
“No, it’s a dog!” she replied, pointing to the figure in the distance.

We stopped, strained our eyes to see the cause of the commotion. My eyes took notice of a large, stocky shadow of an animal meandering along the beach. “No, that’s definitely a cat!” Rich responded, the excitement rising in his voice. We let out an awestruck squeal as the realization hit that right before us was the elusive jaguar! We hurriedly walked up the beach to get a better look.

The jaguar was meandering about with no obvious objective, and then decided to sit down in the sand. My heart was pounding like a jackhammer in my chest as we moved in for a closer look. Bree and Alex crept up along the vegetation, cameras in hand, while the rest of us were not too far behind.

Then, as we proceeded to get closer than I ever imagined, most likely sensing our presence the jaguar righted itself and sauntered off into the forest. My heart dropped when it disappeared from sight, but I was satisfied that we had luckily got near enough to get an actual photo. Upon reaching the spot where it had just been, we saw that the entire beach area was covered in prints.

We decided to sit nearby and stakeout the site for a while, but after about 20 minutes, we half-heartedly decided it was time to move on. Spinning off the adrenaline of that amazing encounter, we hiked the rest of the 9 miles gladly accepting the aches and pains in our feet, knowing every blister was more than worth it.

A diary extract from Jessica Spinelli from New York, USA.

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1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow - congratulations! Having walked that beach I can imagine what it must have felt like to finally see one.