Thursday, July 24, 2008

Daniel's Bay, Nuka Hiva, July 8-10




On July 8 we headed over to Daniel's Bay. The guys caught another tuna just as we were heading into the bay. This time they got a bigeye tuna, which is a good catch! While in the throes of our excitement we invited everyone in the bay over for cocktail hour on the God Spede. It was great fun! The crews from Seabright and Flame were there, along with a couple other boats with folks we hadn't met before. There is sort of a natural progression here from one island to another and we keep finding ourselves in different bays with the same boats over and over again, and many of those boats met each other in Panama or the Galapagos and crossed over from there at about the same time. Anyway, our first cocktail party was loads of fun, we had the crew from Seabright and Flame along with a couple other boats whose people we hadn't met before. Everyone brought along nibbles and drinks and Jeff cooked up some shrimp and we got to trade sea stories and info on upcoming islands.

The next day we took a hike to the waterfall. It was two hours each way. The beginning was through a beautiful village that had a lagoon, and horses and great gardens, then we did our first river crossing and hiked through a rain forest looking place, then more river crossings and eventually the trail led into a box canyon with really high spectacular cliffs and dead-ended at the worlds third highest waterfall. There wasn't a lot of water coming down (this is the dry season here, although it does still rain), but the whole place was still pretty amazing. There was a pond at the bottom with a big eel in it, so we didn't swim although we talked to other people later who said they did, and they still had all their arms and legs, so maybe we should have.

Unfortunately, this was Fred's first day with a bug that we would all eventually get. About halfway up the trail he started throwing up, and didn't stop until we got back to our first river crossing and got in and cooled off. The only good thing about this was that since he was throwing up he was behind Jeff when Jeff slipped on a rock and wound up halfway off the trail. He would have been all the way off, and down a ten foot drop, if Fred hadn't been able to grab his leg and stop him. It was a bit scary, but all OK in the end. Angie also took a spill at one point, but was no more than shaken up. Despite all this crazyness we all agreed it was a great experience and one of the best days we'd had in a long time!

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