A member of the BASK kayaking club, Dave Dolberg, scheduled a trip down to Baja recently but had to cancel it due to health problems. Don Fleming and I had signed up to go on this trip. Since neither of us had ever kayaked in Baja, we didn't feel confident enough to do the trip on our own. Don called around and found a few other BASKers who were knowledgeable about Baja and found several other people interested in going. Eventually the number of interested people grew to ten! The plan for the trip was to drive down the first weekend in April and spend ten days on the water camping in the desert wilderness north of Bahia De Los Angeles. In preparation, I had been collecting equipment and supplies for weeks and on April 3rd I packed up my van with all my gear. I drove down to Vallejo for the start of this trip. Packing up my stuff and checking my list to make sure I had everything took most of the day. I met Don Fleming at his house late in the afternoon to load everything into his truck with my kayak on top. My bus would stay in Vallejo and we would drive Don’s vehicle to Baja.
I stayed in Don’s spare bedroom the night and we left at oh-dark- hundred hours in the morning to meet everyone else at Jeff and Marie Brandt’s house in San Rafael. We met Bob Stender, Joe Petolino, Mary- Marcia Casoly, the mysterious Edgar Nielsen and Penny Wells. Jean Severinghaus will meet us down in Mexico in a few days. We loaded more stuff into Don’s truck, including Jean’s boat on top. Jeff and Marie had two double kayaks on their Suburban, Edgar put Bob’s and Penny’s kayaks on top of his VW Eurovan and his own folding kayak inside. Eight people in three vehicles went down I-5 to San Diego in a long ten hour day of driving and stayed at the house of a friend of Penny’s.
I planned to go fishing in the Sea of Cortez, so I ordered a Mexican fishing license way in advance. It arrived a week early, but the bureaucrats miss-read the starting date in my letter and issued it for the wrong days! I called their office in San Diego on a weekday and the guy in charge offered to come in to his office and fix the permit during the weekend. I arranged to meet him at 9:00 PM on Saturday night. We arrived in time to have dinner before I drove off to this appointment. Hardly anybody believed that this official would really be there when I arrived but there he was! I told him that a native US bureaucrat would never have come in after hours like this, and I had won a few margaritas in a bet that he would actually be there.
We woke up early again to drive south, crossing the border into Mexico. We drove around Tijuana for a while looking for the tourist office. Eventually we found that it has been moved to a spot closer to the border. We walked back into the US, then crossed back through the official office to fill out the forms for a tourist card. Then we drove all day again, stopping to rent dormitory-style rooms at a ranch in Catevina in the high desert. Jean was working for a kayak outfitter in Baja and rode the bus up the day before and was waiting for us at the ranch house. She speaks fluent Spanish and immediately became a great help in renting rooms and ordering food!
Another early morning on Monday April 6th. We drove to Gonzaga Bay, which required sixty kilometers of driving on a bad dirt road. Don was horrified about how rough the roads are and said that he did not expect this. I had offered to use my VW van (but nobody else wanted to trust it) and the roads were about what I expected. We moved one of the boats off Don’s truck onto Jeff and Marie’s car to distribute the load better. Despite this one of Don’s tires developed a leak and we had to stop to patch it. At low speed on the bad road it took us too long to get to Gonzaga Bay and there wasn’t time to shuttle the cars before dark. Four of us (Bob, Jean, Jeff, and Edgar) drove all the cars to Los Angeles Bay and planed on coming back early the next morning. Before they left we bought 400 liters of water from a nearby purification plant. Those of us left behind organized the water into sixty “wine-skin” water-bags in seven piles for fitting into all the boats. Because we would be paddling in a desert area, we would not find fresh water anyplace and we had to carry about four liters of water per person for each day. That means about 80 lbs of water in my boat.
On Tuesday April 7Th we got up and packed all the boats. I was surprised to find all my stuff still fit inside the kayak with 80 lbs of water plus some other gear. The communal gear I am carrying is the large set of nested pots with one of the stoves inside, a liter of fuel, and some sand anchors (devices for holding down tents in the sand). I dragged my boat into the water just to try it out. It was alarming to watch the sea water boiling up through the scuppering holes but it stopped before the boat sank! I spent the next ten days sitting in a deeper than normal puddle inside my boat. The water was only 65 degrees F, so I had to wear a wetsuit while sitting in that puddle all day. I brought my 3mm wetsuit for snorkeling and it did double duty for paddling. It is a full wetsuit but I pulled it up only to my waist and tied the arms out of the way.
Edgar was having back problems and decided not to go on the paddle with us. This was great for the rest of us, since it meant he brought all the other drivers back to the launch spot and completed the shuttle while we paddled. Unfortunately, the drivers came back with inadequate time to pack their boats before the afternoon wind started. We decided to take a layover day, stay in the hotel another night, and leave the next morning.
That afternoon, Bob and I flew kites to try to fool the wind gods into going to bother someone else. It didn’t work and the wind stayed strong from the east all afternoon and evening. Late in the afternoon we saw some people claming in a lagoon behind the hotel and went out to join them. We collected a large bucket of clams and steamed them for our supper. My fishing license specifically forbids me from collecting shellfish but oh well. Most of the BASKers said that they were not going to risk eating shellfish and I tried to stop Bob from collecting so many. But then everyone decided to eat some anyway. None of us had any digestive problems as a result and we’ll all find out later if we get hepatitis-A.