No monkey business today. Well maybe a little. I pulled off the ramp and headed upstream about a tenth of a mile to a small island. It was covered with monkeys. Yes, real monkeys. I paddled up to get some pictures and one of them came down to the waters edge. He seemed interested in me. The quickness that he came to the edge had me wondering if he was going to swim out to my boat. But then I realized that if they were still on the island this long they probably couldn’t swim. He came to the water’s edge and used his tail to grab a branch and lean out and make faces at me. Of course I made them back. I got a brief history of why they were on the island and it’s because they were originally brought here to study polio cures and kept getting in trouble. One of the people said he wished he could send them to Alcatraz. And 50 years later they are still on the island. I probably could have hung out most of the day but I had to get moving. I headed back to the refuge water way for more paddling by gps. I really don’t know how I could ever paddle through these sections with out a GPS. I would get turned around so fast and lost I don’t know if I could ever get out. I think that’s one of the reasons I have always been scared of swamps. I finally made it out and headed for open water. I was paddling through larger isalnds now and made it to the suggested campsite at sunset. I realized that I was spoiled with National Trail camp sites on the Big Bend Trail. This is a tiny, over grown island with enough spot under a tree for a tent and that’s it. The bugs were so bad that even though it looked like an amazing sunset I didn’t get out of my tent to walk 20 feet to the other side of the island to see it.