Beach day on Isla Iguana started with a short fish lecture on the bus.
Roberto also fielded questions about gun ownership in Panama. Every gun owner must have a permit. The permit starts with your fingerprints, your DNA sample, a medical check of your mental and physical competence and a ballistics check from six bullets fired from your weapon. Go around any of these rules and it’s an automatic 6-8 years in prison.
Our destination was Playa Arenal (sand) where boats would be waiting to take us to the Iguana Island. The water was calm and we easily loaded into 3 motor craft and soon experienced thousands of Magnificent Frigate birds whirling and soaring in their dance of love - it was DEFINITELY mating season!
Roberto illustrates a slide of a trigger fish for those who plan to snorkel today on Iguana Island.
The launch point from Playa Arenal.
The greeting iguana.
This is what the beach looks like on Iguana Island. The larger chunks have been liberated by trigger fish chomping on the reef.
There might be an opening for a more skilled sign painter on Iguana Island.
This is a termite enclosure. For some reason, in Panama the termites don’t make mounds from the ground up, they just attach their houses to a branch. Like everywhere else, they are relentless wood eaters, hence almost all houses in Panama are made of concrete.
Hermit crabs by the thousands, each with a distinctive, if temporary, house.
Black lava stones cover the shoreline all along the area where the frigate birds were mating.
We walked most of the lower blob of the island and let the frigates and brown boobies have the upper. Cana Brava - site of the best snorkeling. Lots of angel fish and trigger fish were spotted.
The Magnificent Frigate bird dance…what a privilege to witness the males soaring and inflating the bright red sacks under their heads in order to attract females.
It wasn’t all about frigate birds. Here was a lone black vulture.
There were lots of iguanas of all sizes and colorations. This fellow was over 3-feet long.
Our boats await us in the crystal clear water.
A Yellow-headed Caracara bid us farewell as we pulled into the mangrove inlet. We didn’t have to do a beach landing on our return because the high tide brought us much further inland.
Beach day ended back at Hotel Cubita by picking up the laundry we had done today. Rum went well with the red snapper, pumpkin soup and a superb combination of beans, rice and coconut. Does it get any better than this? I guess we’ll wait until tomorrow for that answer.