Adelaide River 27 August 2006

Sunday was pretty humid before we left, so we managed a last swim before we finally said goodbye to Darwin and drove off towards Kakadu. The best impromptu swim yet! Laura thought it was Peter’s best idea of the day.
First stop was to see the jumping crocodiles by boat on the Adelaide River. It was a lot of fun and really fascinating to get our first real taste of their size and habits. It’s a commercial venture and we had to reflect on whether this was the right thing to do to feed them. They came up to the boat very quickly and we were surprised how many there were about. We saw about 15 crocodiles who jumped up for chunks of meat (only pork) heaving over half of their body out of the water. Some of them were enormous and weighed ¾ tonne. The biggest we saw was Aggro at 5 ½m. He only had one fore arm left. Missing three limbs! They are mean to themselves! Very territorial and stick to the same area. This helps humans know who is around in general. The skipper was able to get very close to them and we were amazed at size of those enormous jaws. We all felt we understood crocs a bit better. They are meaner and sneaker than their pretty little eyes try to tell you - remember “Never smile at a crocodile”. We stayed the night at the carpark by the river; however we were warned not to go outside at night, because of the crocs wandering around. We looked out with the torch a few times and saw a python snake by the car. When we looked again it was half its size as we saw it disappear down a CRACK next to the car. Never saw a crocodile!