Chameleonic Creeper of Saltern Cove

Saltern Cove is littered with rockpools and tufts of hardy greenish grass, and its sandy recesses are surrounded by beautiful, layered cliffs of limestone and slate. It is just south of the busy little Devon seaside town of Paignton - and on the 27th of July, 2010, a woman named Gill Pearce would be among a small group of locals who would catch sight of something very weird in the algae-rich waters of the bay at about 15:30 that afternoon. This specific something would likely have been better suited to the gloom of Loch Ness, and yet here it was in the cold water of the English coast...

## Paignton Plesiosaur

When the locals first spotted the beast, they assumed that it must've been a turtle. It had a reptilian head, and seemed to have a shell on its back, but as photographs later taken of the creature would prove - its other anatomical features didn't even remotely fit a chelonian identity. For example, its neck was far too long. Whatever it was was roughly 30 yards away from the shoreline, stalking a school of mackerel. These fish were apparently so terrified by the pursuit of this nebulous predator that they intentionally beached themselves by swimming into the shallows in an effort to escape. The creature continued following the school as best as it could - and it was at this moment that one of the witnesses, a woman named Gill Pearce, had the mind to snap some photographs of the bizarre critter in the water in front of her. It was further out in the sea than it had been when it had first been noticed, but the photographs she was able to take still definitely depict a dark shape with an abnormally long neck. She described the creature as being approximately 3 meters in total length, and as having a rounded greenish-brown hump on its back with long flippers and a neck of roughly 2.5ft in length.

Pearce reported the sighting to the Marine Conservation Society (MCS), and handed over the photographs so that they could be studied by experts in identification of marine life. This organisation was represented by one Claire Fischer (great name for a marine biologist) who pointed out that the subject of the photograph was unlikely to be a turtle of any kind normally present around the area '*as they only eat jellyfish*'. Some wannabe researchers suggested that perhaps this sighting was linked to the sperm whale which had been being sighted in the waters around Devon at around that same time, but Fischer dismissed this by saying that sperm whales wouldn't come so far inshore, and that the reptilian head described by the witnesses didn't match this potential identity. Fischer stated that the creature had apparently had larger front flippers than back flippers, and that its neck craned above the surface of the water '*like a plesiosaur*'. I would just like to quickly note here that plesiosaurs were not actually able to crane their necks above the water like swans - this is an incorrect statement on behalf of Fischer, unfortunately. Then again, sea turtles are not capable of this movement either, and so I guess that's one thing. Overall, Fischer and the MCS concluded that the sighting was '*not a fake*' but that they had no idea what exactly had been on the English coast on that fateful day.

Also on that fateful day - at that exact fateful moment, actually - 63-year-old Graham Oxley became a witness to the unknown while walking his dog along the Saltern Cove beach. He had come there from Paignton, and he described being astonished by the bizarre creature in the water off the coast. He thought it was a turtle at first - there was a black dome '*which was more rounded than a turtle's shell*' and a reptilian head which kept surfacing from the water every five minutes. It was lurking in some weeds beneath approximately 4ft of water - and Oxley soon realised that what he was looking at was no mundane turtle. What he had thought to be a chelonian shell was actually the creature's arched back - which '*seemed to change colour like a chameleon*'. When the creature was in the shade, it was a blackish colour, but when it swum off into the light it became a greenish-brown seemingly to match the changing light conditions. It had been stationary, feeding on the weeds, and Graham was captivated by it for about half an hour before it dawned on him that he should probably rush home to get his camera to capture evidence. When he returned, the strange critter had swum off.

This multiple-witness sea serpent story is intriguing because of the volume of evidence. There are two admittedly poor quality photographs - but there are also two detailed and separate witness accounts to back up the shoddy photos. The opinion of the MCS is interesting as well, and I wonder how often it is that they admit that they can't identify something in their local waters? All I can say is that the ocean is a mysterious place.

## Sources

'The New Nessie?' in *The Daily Mail*

 '*Beasts of Britain*' by Andrew McGrath (content available for free on a blog here)