An annual guys kayaking trip into the Okavango Delta became a harrowing adventure on Wednesday this week.
John Sandenbergh, Chris MacIntyre and Richmond MacIntyre, all experienced outdoorsmen, had been paddling kayaks and making their way towards their home base of Maun from the northern part of the Okavango Delta. For three days they had seen no other boat or no other person.
Wednesday proved different.
They came around a bend in the channel near Xugana Lagoon when a crocodile of about three and half metres long shot off the bank toward Sandenbergh’s right hand side. It attacked.
The crocodile which attacked John Sandenbergh
Sandenbergh says he jammed his paddle down the croc’s throat, which happened to be yellow in colour, like his paddle. The paddle broke in the crocodile’s mouth. In the melee Sandenbergh’s kayak flipped and he found himself under water, scrambling to get his head into the forward compartment and waiting for what seemed forever for the crocodile to attack again.
“I saw my life flash before my eyes”, he said.
The next thing he knew he was flipped right side up. He was sure the croc flipped him again. But it was his rescuer, Coca (Kangura) Dikoma, a Desert & Delta Safaris guide who was on his way back to Xugana Island Lodge with guests when Sandenbergh’s mates flagged him down.
“He shouted to us… Come here!!!…There is a man under the water!” Coca said. Coca flipped the kayak. “I told him to hold one side of the boat and I pulled his other hand.”
Later Sandenbergh would say he could only remember being in the water and suddenly on the boat.
Coca’s guests, Fabian Huwyler and Priska Williman from Switzerland, credit Coca with saving him. They had taken photos of the crocodile, which, as Xugana Island Lodge Manager Obie Magunga says, “parks there on the corner of the river all the time.”
Coca welcomed the kayakers on board, gave a shivering Sandenbergh blankets and pulled the kayaks behind the Desert & Delta Safaris boat back to the lodge. The unexpected guests were given brunch, warm drinks and a charter flight organised to get them back to Maun. Sandenbergh even got clean and folded laundry.
“To me, if we were not on time, something would have happened,” Coca said with understatement.
The MacIntyres and Sandenbergh all marvelled at the good fortune of the boat’s arrival at just the right moment. That Desert & Delta Safaris boat was indeed on time.
For his part, Coca, a native of Etsha 6 (an area to the north west of Xugana Island Lodge in the Okavango Delta) who is accustomed to the Delta, has no desire to kayak the channels near Xugana. He prefers the mokoro, which he launches for guests where “it is very, very shallow (and) where you will not find crocodiles.”
Coca, the guide who arrived in the nick of time
But the three buddies planned to resume their kayak trip once their kayaks could be transported by truck to Maun. Despite his hands shaking and his pursuit of cigarette after cigarette on Wednesday afternoon, Sandenbergh said, perhaps a bit unconvincingly, “You have to get back on the horse.” In his case, it is mandatory to jump back in his kayak and paddle. He owns a kayak adventure company after all. He will need a new paddle. The other one, part of it anyway, was the crocodile’s lunch.
-Written by Maria Henson, guest at Xugana Island Lodge and old friend of Desert & Delta Safaris.
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