Monday 11th May

[8:12]

Decided to get off my ass and take some photos of the 6:45 sunrise...

I was pleased how they came out.

[10:23]

Getting up so early meant I had time to give one of the local nature companies a call and get myself on their kayak tour through the local mangrove river. This was the first time I'd done something like this. I was quite looking forward to it. Linda not so...

So whilst I was doing this :

Linda was doing this :

My paddle out to the farthest point of the river was pretty simple, as we were travelling with the current. It was more difficult coming back though as I was losing every other paddle to the current. Still, it gave me a good reason to use my underwater camera and come up with award winning photos such as this:

This shows a whelk and it's egg casing (the line of discs above the whelk). Eat your heart out David Attenborough! One thing I will say, when I was just drifting along down the river, I was in one of the quietest places I've ever known. No human noise, no wind, no water sounds (the river was very slow), just the odd splash as yet another Mullet leaps out of the river. Yes, this river has an open area that is known as Mullet Lake.

/pause here for Jason to make a joke at Petes hair's expense...

These mullets were jumping high out of the water (experts are still not sure why). Only when one of the nearby Ospreys were about did things quieten down fish wise.

The whole trip lasted nearly 3 hours. By the time I got back to the hotel, I was hot and thirsty. One quick drink later and I was into the pool again.

After our swim, we went for a walk along the beach. Linda wanted to pick some shells for home. There wasn't many good ones about though - the best are picked up at sunrise - as I saw for myself this morning.

At the end of the day we returned to the nature place that I'd done the kayak trip from. This time we were both booked on the sunset nature cruise. We were hoping to see dolphin and manatee, but we were out of luck there. We mainly saw birds on the trip. Still, there was a nice sunset - although not down to sea level, as we were on a lake surrounded by a tree-line.