The dew was thick in camp in the morning. My bag was pretty damp.

After breakfast we headed out in the kayaks to explore the mangroves.  One thing we wanted to see was the “boca” or mouth of the mangroves where the tidal flow goes in and out.  Books warn that the tidal flow is very strong in the boca and to explore it by kayak only when the tide was coming in, otherwise you might get sucked out to the ocean!  The tide was full this morning and was just starting to go out.  It would be the afternoon before we’d try to head over to the mouth. 

The bird life in the mangroves was not as exciting as I had hoped.  There were a lot of birds, don’t get me wrong, but I guess I had expectations that were too high.  I did get some new life-list birds though like the yellow-crowned night heron, white ibis, marbled gotwit, little blue heron, and willet.  There were quite a few snowy and great egrets around and they are always cool to see with their striking plumage.  

Marbled godwits (larger) and willets

White ibis

Here are a couple of Brian's bird pictures with his 100-400 lens.

Yellow-crowned night heron

Reddish egret

Tricolored heron

The fishermen were hard at work setting and checking their nets.  The Mexican fishermen have to be the hardest working folk I’ve ever seen. 

We came back to camp for lunch and some down time.  I went on a hike and worked on my journal some.  Once the tide was out we decided to get back out there so we could get over to the mouth as the tide was coming in.   It was a good 50 yards of pushing the yaks through muck before we hit open water, damn that was some hard work too.  I kept sinking so damn deep that I couldn’t get out.  I finally decided to simply sit in the yak, then using my arms I’d do a long pull and I ended up making better ground that way.  We hit the open water and my triceps and lats were screaming from the 45 minutes of pulling my big ass out there through the mud!! 

Me pulling myself through the low tide

Once we got to the other side of the bay we realized that we messed up and the tide was still going out!  We were bottoming out everywhere!  This really limited where we could go.  I ended up going back to camp to do some napping, of course, it took another 45 minutes of pulling my big ass through the mud!!  Haha  The damn scallop shells were really sharp too and left some nasty gouges in the bottom of my new yak.  Bummer.  I saw a few sea urchins in the mud as I was dragging myself along, had to watch where I put my hands!  The visit to the boca didn't happen this trip. Oh well.

The low tide was pretty neat because all of the wading birds really came out to get dinner.  One area had a fisherman’s net completely out of the water.  One fish stuck in the net got eaten by a turkey vulture which was cool to see up close and luckily the vulture didn’t get caught in the net itself. 

That night I cleaned up a lot of the area around camp.  The fishermen leave a lot of garbage and old fishing line.  The fishing line can be really bad for wildlife, birds especially.  That is my one beef with Mexico I guess, the way they handle trash.  Pretty much every camp we had I would spend 30 minutes cleaning up all the garbage and everything that could be burned would get burned and recyclables were kept for later recycling.