The Island turned out to be even cooler than I could have thought and we had it all to ourselves. The first thing to notice were the hermit crabs… not a handful, not hundreds, but THOUSANDS! Every size and shape and they were everywhere. Alex took us over to a rocky area that housed some tide pools since it was low tide. He found, and caught with his hands a puffer fish! I’d never seen one before, and it was funny to watch it be all puffed up, and then start leaking water!
Then he walked us over to a little cave that was filled with a bunch of odd Silverfish-type of insects crawling all over the place. After the cave we walked over a small waterfall that Karen and I sat under to “refresh” ourselves. The water was very cool compared to the ocean water. We returned to the beach where Alex had created a hermit crab race area. Basically it was a big circle that we could put our hermit crab in the center of and see whose made it outside the circle first… mine did of course ;-). We followed that up with some snorkeling… well most of us anyway, Dylan decided to play on the beach. THe water is kinda murky, but I did happen to see a pretty cool little school of striped fish:
After the snorkeling we ate some bananas and pineapple that Alex had brought for us… he mentioned that the iguanas like banana, so Karen threw a piece towards the hillside and we watched an iguana come scrambling down the hill like a dog after a piece of meat… it was pretty funny. Karen then gave him another piece. The hill he came running down was “alive” with hermit crabs:
Finally we loaded up and headed back to the shore… this time Karen took Dylan and I went solo. Although it was easier, I ended up being the last one in again, and as I made the finally strokes towards the beach, (as Alex instructed me too), a wave came underneath me (I wish I could say it was huge, but it was actually pretty tiny), turned my kayak sideways, and pitched me into the water. Only Aidan saw me eat it and was yelling “Daddy wiped out, Daddy wiped out!” I heard this as I stood up in the water and threw my arms in the air in a show of victory, only to have the next wave slam the kayak into me from behind and knock me down… again.
All in all it was a pretty awesome adventure, with a little bit of everything mixed in.
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