Coiba Marine National Park, Panama
We arrived this morning at Coiba Island, the last Devil’s Island of the world. Coiba is also Panama’s newest national marine park, with an extension of 272,000 hectors making this the third largest marine park in the world. (The Great Barrier Reef and the Galapagos are larger). Coiba has been a penal colony since 1919 till present day. With the creation of the park in 1991, the penal colony will no longer exist in the near future. Today the population is less than fifty and will probably be just a memory next year.
Our morning started off with a productive pre-breakfast birding tour at park headquarters. Sights of red-legged honeycreepers, crimson-backed tanagers, red-crowned woodpeckers and orange-chinned parakeets filled our optics with color. Then to top it off, on our way back to the ship, a pod of pacific spotted dolphins approached our zodiacs and gave us a quick look. After breakfast we repositioned to a small “far-side” cartoon island known as “Granito de Oro”. The morning activities concentrated on snorkeling, kayaking, sunbathing and some quite creative sand castle building.
Our afternoon was truly a surprise, as you can see in the bottom photo it looked like it was going to rain, and hard. But much to our surprise the sun came out in the afternoon and it was a scorcher! Some took the trail on the island and realized why most prisoners don’t escape, some went cruising in the Zodiacs around the offshore islets, while others had to go back to the coralline beach to get in some more snorkeling and take advantage of the rainy season sun. In all, the warm tropical island, with a white sandy beach, just made this a perfect day.
