croc attack

Last night was one of the most bizarre experiences of my life! We were all fast asleep when at about 4am there was a loud bang that woke us all up, we assumed it was the tinny drifting into the back of the yacht on the tide – something that happens occasionally when there is no wind and a tidal current running. But, when we got on deck the tinny was hanging back on its tow line, 40m from the yacht. We had a look around but couldnt see anything that might have caused such a loud noise. I was checking for something floating in the water like a log when i noticed a dark shape behind the yacht. I asked Dave to get the spotlight and have a look – it was about a 3,5m croc!

It was totally unphased by us, floating a couple of metres behind the yacht, then the damn thing started gently chewing on the tow line for the tinny! We realised he couldn’t really damage the line, but we just assumed the noise we heard was him biting the towline and pulling on it hard. So we all went back to bed after taking some video footage of him, but at about 5 there was another huge crashing, bashing noise and we rushed up on deck again. The croc was literally at the back of the boat, hanging vertically with his head out of the water, right bedside the bottom of the sugar scoop.

As he drifted back and his body floated to the surface I could see something beside his front right hand leg, slowly I realised it was our red ensign, the Australian maritime flag we fly from the side of the sugar scoop. Sure enough when I looked, not just was the flag gone, the flag pole was gone and he had also torn out the stainless steel rod holder that was fixed in the hull to hold the flagpole!

So he must have leapt vertically our of the water and torn the whole setup out of the boat! Dave promptly grabbed the Aboriginal flag from the other side and put it in the cockpit and we finally went back to bed again.

This morning I got up and was looking at the scene of the crime and I noticed the rod holder on the side where the Aboriginal flag had been was also nearly torn out of the hull, I unrolled the flag that Dave had rolled up in the dark and sure enough, about half of it was missing!

So for some reason he must have decided the flags were a food source and at least twice leapt vertically out of the water to try to eat them! No wonder the noises were so loud!!

Anyway a sobering reminder of just how agile they can be and how careful you need to be in their habitat. We also had a close experience with a big croc yesterday at Gali’winku, I will talk about that in the coming post about the final part of our trip home.

Here is the footage of him chewing on the tow rope,

www.vimeo.com/1011857086