The Rum Diary: Marques and Teal: Coiba

Coiba…an unspoiled magical monkey land! I feel so lucky to have gotten to explore this beautiful place. Located off the Pacific coast of Panama, Coiba has remained pristine and mostly uninhabited thanks to a Penal Colony established in 1919. Now, it is a National Park and scientific research area, and thus shall remain its unique and beautiful self.

We arrived here on the morning of May 6^th, after a 30 hour motor sail from Las Perlas, Panama. We had a lovely trip, as the water was extremely calm and the weather was nice and sunny. We caught a good sized mahi-mahi which we ate for dinner that evening. We also saw a pod of bottle nosed dolphins. There must be something special in the waters of the Pacific, because these dolphins were the largest I have ever seen.

Coiba is the largest island in Central America, and it includes a handful of small surrounding islands. The islands are incredibly lush with the most vivid green vegetation. The coastlines are dotted with beautiful stretches of sand. Long description short, it was very picturesque sailing to our anchorage.

Upon arrival I accompanied Marques to shore to check in at the park office. This was the only inhabited area I saw, and it included a small bunch of buildings that housed the park officer, and may have been open to the occasional tourist that comes through. The park officer’s name was Lionso. He was very friendly and didn’t speak much English. Between my broken Spanish, and his broken English, we actually had a very good conversation. He gave us advice on where to snorkel and dive, and told us about a great 2 hour hike.

National Park Office

We had a jammed packed couple of days on these islands filled with snorkeling, diving and hiking. I was able to Scuba dive twice. Although the diving wasn’t as spectacular as I had anticipated, we did see a lot of sharks- mostly small white-tipped reef sharks and nurse sharks. The snorkel, however, was amazing. This was our first snorkel in the Pacific, and there were tons of new fish to identify. I also saw around 8 turtles.

My favorite part of our time in Coiba was the hike. Our adventure began with a intimidating stroll through crocodile infested water. As we entered the bay on the tender to look for the trailhead, what we thought was a floating log beside us was actually a needle nosed crocodile. Unfortunately, our tender could not make it to the beach where we began our hike, so we nervously waded through the last 200 ft of water to the beach. After making it safely to the trailhead, we began our hike. It was early in the morning, and already the jungle was filled with various voices of birds and the unmistakable howl of the endemic Coiba Island Howler Monkeys. It wasn’t long before we came upon a loud crash in the trees, and the face of a howler monkey peeked out of one of the branches. They were timid at first, but soon we had a few of them in full site howling away! Although that was our only sighting of the howler monkeys, the rest of the trail we were accompanied by many white-headed capuchin monkeys. It was hilarious watching these little guys crashing around. I had always pictured monkeys to be gracefully swinging between the trees of the jungle, but in reality they look a bit clumsy hurling themselves onto the branches.