This took us past some aquaculture floats in the calm water behind Punta Salsipuedes. These are 50 meter floating rings with nets hanging in some of them. I didn’t notice before but some of these rings show up in the satellite photos on Google! We learned later that they keep farm raised blue fin tuna in these nets to fatten them up in the ocean before taking them to market. We paddled close to one of these that did not have a net in it, but did have a fearless young sea lion napping in the morning sun.
We arrived at Isla Todos Santos around lunchtime. This is actually two islands: A northern one that is flat and featureless but for two lighthouses on it, and a southern island that is hilly and more interesting to look at. From space I could see some blue lagoons on the protected east side of the south island so we headed directly there. The shoreline is rugged and beautiful with spectacular rock gardening. In the calm water on the east side we found a small cove with rocky beaches and continued looking behind the offshore rocks. The deepest blue lagoon I had seen from space turned out to be some sort of crater or caldera that had vertical cliffs rising out of the water and no place to land or camp. Clustered offshore here there is a group of the aquaculture rings, and I started hearing a generator running. The next cove had a large modern house on the bluff, other smaller structures, a floating dock with scuba divers lugging tanks up the ramp and several aluminum skiffs. We decided this must be the headquarters of the aquaculture operation. So we returned to the first cove we had seen and set up camp there.
Gregg had loaded his boat with forty liters of water on the first day, a typical load for a two-week trip in Baja. Charles and I had each brought a hand-pumped desalinator to make our own drinking water. As a backup we had each started with ten liters of water. The first two nights we had landed on beaches too sandy, rough or turbid to use the water-makers and dipped into our reserve. The cove we found ourselves in on this afternoon had beautiful clear water, a rocky bottom, calm swells and rocks to sit on in the shade of the bluff while working. I sat down for just over an hour and made 6 liters of drinking water to replenish what I had used up so far. Charles insisted on sitting in the sun while he tried out his newly refurbished desalinator for the first time. Both desalinators worked fine and we probably could have taken turns with one. Having two in case one broke was probably a good safety net.
I went for a short hike before dinner. The island is covered with gulls that pick large nesting areas clean of vegetation. You can walk anywhere on the island on these clear paths, if you don’t mind hundreds of screaming gulls buzzing overhead. Since it was not nesting season I did not mind bothering the birds. Up on the edge of the bluff are the ruins of foundations of old houses on the island. Also an old road cut into the cliff that went halfway down to the deep lagoon. Below that are a few pieces of foundation left from some structure, perhaps a crane, which gave access the rest of the way down to a great deep harbor. We saw a couple of yachts working their way into that harbor but never managed to talk to anyone on them.
While we were eating dinner a wet bedraggled pelican swam ashore and flopped up on our beach. It dragged itself up the berm above the high tide line and made a beeline for Gregg’s camp. It settled down with its chest on the foot of Gregg’s sleeping bag. I’ve read about ocean going birds beaching themselves like this when sick or injured and seen this behavior several times before in other birds. While recovering they show no fear of man, perhaps knowing that as dangerous as we are we present less danger than hypothermia and drowning. The pelican allowed Gregg to sleep in the rest of his bag and moved around him in the night. At one time he woke up with the wing covering his face. We joked with Gregg about his new girlfriend. She was still there when we all got up in the morning.