The tide was supposed to be helping us but our average speed was still only two miles an hour. This was doubly surprising because we also had a tailwind all day. Lucy O’Brien was upset with me the day before when I commented on the tailwind, so today I kept my trap shut. She says that mountain climbers are particularly superstitious about good weather. When the weather is in your favor they never mention this out loud for fear that commenting on it will cause it to change to bad weather.
Around each point we encountered a rip current, the largest of which was the last point before turning east at the upper left corner of the island. That rip current was as big as the one at Yellow Bluff in the San Francisco often gets on a big ebb tide. This expedition was originally planned to be a laid-back trip for intermediate kayakers to join. Many of the conditions we paddled through have been pretty advanced and we figured some of the people invited would have been uncomfortable. The only people who ended up coming with me were pretty advanced paddlers and none of us had any trouble at all.
When we turned the last corner into Bahia Agua Dulce we had an argument about where to camp. Lucy wanted to camp near the point where the hiking looked good. But the beach was large slippery cobble that was terrible for landing on. John Somers and I landed and looked around and found the only camping was a few patches of sand between desert scrub bushes. I really did not want to camp there, especially since we were scheduled to take a layover day and spend two days here. While I was looking around on land for someplace good to camp the other three kayakers were huddling on the water. I hoped that they would make a decision by the time I walked back to my kayak and launched. They called me over to tell me that their decision was: “Let Mike choose”. I chose to paddle half way across the bay to a sandy beach. Lucy was pissed because that took us far away from the foothills and interesting climbing. Instead we camped on the edge of a large flat plane.
However, what I found in the middle of the bay was a very nice place to camp. A grove of (non native) trees on a short bluff above the water. Protection from wind and sun. The only fly in the ointment was that it was also a popular fish camp with the local panga fishermen. This means there was trash strewn everywhere, old refrigerators, cat-holes under and toilet paper hanging from some of the bushes. Fire pits in the most stupid places, like in the roots of a tree that helps create this nice place. I’m not complaining, this is just the way all fish camps look and how you recognize the best camping spots. An interesting but disconcerting discovery was a dirt road at the back of the camp that seemed to have fresh tire tracks on it.
One other nice thing about our campsite was that it had an unobstructed view to the east. We knew that there was going to be a total lunar eclipse that evening and planned to watch it. The Moon rose already a pumpkin orange color, making me think that the eclipse was already well underway. This was, however, simply the normal harvest moon on the night when it was full. The Moon rose quite a ways above the mountains of the Mexican mainland before the Earth’s shadow started to take a bite out of it. Slowly the Moon was covered up and our camp became too dark to navigate through without a flashlight. We were surprised at how long it took the eclipse to go through the whole cycle. It was hours before the shadow left and a crescent of bright white appeared again. Everyone else went to sleep in their tents and I tried to stay up to watch the rest of the moon re-appear. I dozed off in my chair for minutes at a time and woke up with a start wondering if I had missed the end of the eclipse. So before the moon was uncovered but when it was bright enough to navigate back to my tent, I finally went to bed.