2/11/02 | Wildlife

I guess we've finally contracted mañana syndrome. The other day, we had gotten everything ready to weigh anchor and head to another island; we'd tied down the dinghy, closed hatches, loaded the route into our GPS, and flipped on the windlass breaker. Britt was putting his shoes on as I turned the key to start the motor.

Nothing happened.

I looked at Britt. He shrugged. "Probably just corrosion. We'll fix it later. I'm too hot to deal with it now. Let's go snorkeling instead." And with that, he took his shoes back off.

So we went snorkeling. Later we hooked up the electrical meter to the ignition wires, verified that it was just a corroded connector, and put a nice clean new one on. By then it was too late to leave. But mañana is just as good when you don't actually have to be anywhere in particular.

After finally leaving Islandia, we had a short day of motorsailing to Mono Island, which sits not far out from the mainland, a mangrove lagoon tucked behind it. The route was mostly inside the outer reefs and islands, but during one unprotected three-mile stretch we rocked and rolled in the open water as ocean swells came thundering in. And with the waves came...dolphins! Half a dozen cavorted around us, jumping and diving, sometimes seeming to nuzzle up against our hull. This was the first time we'd seen dolphins in big seas, and it was quite a sight. They would ride a swell like an elevator, then at the top floor jump out of the wave's trailing edge, catching air in the trough. A few times, watching a sleek white-spotted body rise above us in an upwind wave, I worried that it would land on our deck. But as usual, the dolphins knew exactly what they were doing, swimming circles (literally) around our plodding boat, a strange plaything for such agile creatures. As we reached the far edge of the open-water stretch, and the water became smoother and calmer, we crossed paths with a Colombian coconut freighter going in the opposite direction -- and those dolphins deserted us and took up with the freighter! I hope the men in that boat enjoyed their escort as much as we did.

We had a few miles more of reef-dodging before our destination, but soon we were at anchor in the calm water behind Mono Island. After lunch, we dropped the dinghy and headed into the mangrove lagoon. The cut of a side channel, too clean to be natural, led us to a landing beside a good trail. We followed the trail through coconut and mango groves and emerged from the jungle onto a wild and windswept beach. Breakers crashed against the shore. At high water the beach would disappear completely, but with the tide down we had a stretch of wet sand to walk.

We walked along the arc of beach until we spotted what looked like the mouth of a small river, emptying into the ocean at a wide sandbar ahead. That would be our turnaround point, a good destination, we decided. Seventy yards from the river, Britt suddenly stopped and grabbed my arm, motioning with his other arm toward the river mouth. "See it?" he whispered.

I did. "It" was a caiman, a six-foot-long river crocodile that had been sunning itself at the edge of the sandbar; it must have heard us, or seen us, or smelled us approaching, because it was sliding swiftly and smoothly into the deep pool at the river's mouth.

"I was going to suggest," said Britt, "a nice freshwater swim."

Instead we squatted in the sand and examined the crocodile's tracks, and looked at shells and rocks, and the way the river water trickled into the ocean. Then we retraced our steps across the beach and back into the jungle. As we hiked along the path, we caught a movement in the trees. Two monkeys swung along the treetops, taking the high road away from us.

Back in the anchorage, we were alone as usual. No other yachts in sight, and only a few dugout canoes out on the water. But we saw birds -- hawks, herons, and pelicans -- and in the water we could see lots of tiny fish. And somewhere, we knew, there was a crocodile.