I had to. After three months of living in the jungle, of imagining them in all the dark water holes I was crossing maybe a little too recklessly, of praising their beauty and magnificence to whoever might lend me a pitiful ear and of warning each and every tourist of their merciless strength, I just had to see that they were actually real. Until then I felt incredibly smart and a little unlucky and immediately after kind of naïve and very lucky at the thought that I had evaded them so far. Whatever were the reasons of us not crossing paths, there was still this tiny nagging voice in the back of my mind wondering if the threat was actually real, if it wasn't all an ingenious fabrication by some wicked minds to keep me from swimming in the alluring waters of the ocean. So, I boarded the boat with twenty other curious souls, waiting to be fascinated by this evolutionary sensation that survived undisturbed throughout millions of years of shifting tectonic plates, disastrous climate changes and the coming and going of thousands of other species. Having lived that long and gathered experience and wisdom along the way, there is truly no wonder that they are so chill. Or maybe it's their sound knowledge that apart from these two-legged, boats-using, weirdos, no one can dethrone them from their rightful place as the rulers of the coastal rivers and mangrove swamps that allows them to frivolously braze in the sun, stretched out on the riverbanks with intimidating calmness and seemingly bathing in the tourists' stunned attention. Ernie, our skipper took us along several side-arms of Cooper creek, and I was relieved to see that my initial judgements on the preferred habitat of the warm-and-murky-water loving reptiles was true to the point, with this part of the river being close to the ocean, several-meters deep and wide and thus providing the perfect hunting grounds for an animal that in his up to eighty years of life can grow up to five meters long and stay underwater for up to an hour. This fact-dropping feels necessary at this point after several rumours reached me that crocodiles can hold their breath for half a day, which would have made it almost impossible to spot them on the ocean. Well, now we know better. We also learned that the rumour that the crocs are easiest to spot at low tide is not entirely true. Sure, it helps, but on a sunny day the cold-blooded creatures apparently start their sun-brazing as early in the day as possible to gather the energy lost during the chilly nights, independently of the tides. And as soon as they're hungry, they slowly drop into the anonymity of the sandy waters to snack on careless fish and crabs. About twenty very territorial females, 40 younglings and twelve majestic males, who come in from the ocean to mate with the ladies, occupy this about ten square kilometre large delta. There are several reasons why their population has transcended the limits of freshwater rivers in the last ten years. Before that the locals would regularly go on kayak trips and snorkelling tours without fearing to get ripped apart. One theory suggests that the water temperature increase caused both the enlargement of their comfortable living area, warmer waters all year round even further down the Queensland coast, and also an increase of their metabolic activity, meaning that the hungrier reptiles have to go further to find food. Another theory relates the surplus of crocs to the beginning of awareness towards protecting their population which removed them from all legal hunting lists about fifty years ago, such that there are now so many more fully grown adults, that they had to extend their territories into the ocean and further south. In any case they are part of this place now and nobody would want it otherwise.