Isla Coiba Jan 30TH: Up Crocodile Creek

I am super glad we are not going anywhere today, my back is sore and after a big days paddling in some real hot weather yesterday I am more than happy to sleep in lounge away the morning with pancakes, then walk up the long extensive beach before returning to camp for another nap. I am happy Allie is doing so well she was up before me and seems really chipper, she handled her first big paddling day well and I think I may be in worse shape for it than her?

On our walk up the beach we encountered the 7 Macaws again and the flu right over our heads, we also encountered the local troop of Capuchin Monkeys. These cute little monkeys were raiding the Coconut palms for Coconuts and amongst the hoots and chatters, took time to check us out cautiously. On the walk back from the far point (around which we discovered another far point; a lot of beach on this southern end of the island) we had invaders. A fishing boat had come and anchored in our sheltered cove and brought clients to shore on a sit on top kayak, we felt incensed “ how dare they come and land on our beach!” ha ha ha ha, they were probably thinking a similar thing “ there isn’t meant to be any one on these beaches!”. the eventually left us to our afternoon snooze and we never interacted, preferring our solitude form pointless chit chat.

In the afternoon, we paddled back around the headland to the river we saw the croc come from, and we landed through the surf, portaged our boats over the sand bar and paddled up a little creek. We were cautiously inspected by the resident croc who quickly disappeared not to return, we came across our friends the monkeys again who probably thought we were the strangest crocs they had seen in this river before and we headed up as far as we could paddle. We came to a stony rapid and here we bathed and rinsed the boats, and I tried once again to catch a fish; this time I caught a fresh water shrimp put it on a hook and cast to a couple of good size fish lurking in a pool, they were on it quick snap and soon I had a fish on fighting hard, as soon as it was on, it got a little slack spat the hook and was off! GRRR! I tried again with anew shrimp which took half an hour to find, though no good they were wise now and wouldn’t fall for it. We paddled back on dusk, no fish, but I had caught a very large prawn to eat. We pushed out through some pretty dumpy little waves from the sand bar and enjoyed the sunset as we paddled back around to camp for a pasta dinner and a fire roasted prawn. Oh an d I made some cinnamon swirl buns for lunch on the fire as well. Yum yum!