Otter 501 - by Gay Kraeger

Otter 501 is a feature film soon to be released. Sea Studios, the organization creating the film, believes the film will draw a lot of attention to the otters at Moss Landing State Beach in central California. So they decided to raise money to put an interpretive panel at the beach.

Holly and I eat at the restaurant across the inlet here all the time when we have meetings in this part of the world. We love sitting at the window and looking out at all the wildlife. The otter raft is one of the very cool things to watch while we eat, so we were delighted to be contacted by Sea Studios.
We met with an amazing woman from the film company to talk about creating a panel about the otters. She told us the group at Moss Landing Beach are almost all males. They come here to eat yummy fat innkeeper worms, (something they don't serve in the restaurant across the bay) clams, (something the restaurant does serve.) The otters also shelter from the rougher weather in Monterey Bay.

I did some rough sketches on the spot as Holly and Arlene talked, but most of these pages I did back at the studio. I could not find much in underwater still photography of the southern sea otter, so I looked at underwater videos of swimming sea otters. I would pause the video and sketch as fast as I could.