Kayaking the Mangroves - May 15, 2010

We were all psyched to go on our kayak trip.  It was an awesome trip.  We all met up and got outfitted with life jackets and paddles.  Samantha picked out our kayak (any guesses??)  Yes red and yellow - they didn't have pink but the red was close enough for Samantha. :)

We saw lots of small crabs - both a light colour and then different ones that had a redish/purplish colour.  Samantha and I found a crab hotel - this dead mangrove tree in the water was full of crabs.  We also saw two reef herons - darker in colour and smaller.  We stopped and got out to see if we could find some foxes.  We found their dens but sadly no fox.  We learnt that the mangroves get their oxygen in two ways - high tide through their roots that are in the sand and low tide from their roots that are then exposed to the air.  We thought the little spiky things were new shoots but are actually their roots.  The tips of the roots are as high as the water gets at high tide. 

Patrick got out with our tour guide at one point to find some bigger crabs.  He came back to the boats with a blue crab.  Very cool!!

We found out that they do camp out tours as well.  They take the kayaks and your gear out to some of the islands and then set up camp - we were told that then you can swim with the turtles and dolphins.  I think we will be looking into that for next year. :)