After the long paddle the day before we took our time getting started in the morning and I used that time to go fishing. Inside the first fifteen minutes I caught a 40 centimeter “grunt”, a silvery fish with iridescent highlights in it’s scales. I could see the bottom through the water and dropped my fishing lure down to the boundary between the rocks and the sandy bottom. The water was so clear I could see schools of fish swim under me and watch them react to my lure bobbing up and down. But it took another hour before I caught a small 20 centimeter spotted bay bass. I landed with these two fish to start cleaning them before everyone else got ready to go. I did the cleaning a ways from the boats and it took me another hour to learn how to filet the two fish. In that time the tide started coming in and picked up the equipment I had left by my boat. While I ran back and forth to move my stuff to safety, a sea gull landed and ate three of the 4 fillets I had spent so much time cutting out of the big fish! I finished filleting the small fish, cut the fillets into bite-sized pieces, and put them in a zip lock bag with some soy sauce and the juice from half a lemon. The lemon cooked the fish like ceveche, and the soy sauce gave it a Japanese sashimi flavor to have for lunch later over rice with some Wasabe.
After all that work fishing, I still had to take my tent down and pack up my boat. I felt rushed to catch up with everyone and didn’t have time to start my rice until we all stopped for lunch. I had cooked some sticky sushi rice the week before and dried it in the dehydrator. Sort of like making my own instant rice, only it could be re-hydrated in a few hours without any cooking. But with only a half an hour to hydrate, the rice was still crunchy when I ate it that day. From then on I planned my days better and put a cup of water in a zip-lock bag of rice in the morning so it was always perfect by lunch. I offered a piece of fish to everyone who was not squeamish about “raw” fish. The lemon juice had actually cooked the fish by lunch time.
While I was fiddling with lunch Joe had used his time to go snorkeling. My diving gear was buried in my boat so I borrowed Joe’s mask when he was done. I just slipped into the arms of my wetsuit and zipped up the back. I swam around and dove down to only two meters or so. Without a weight belt I could not stay down long. I tried grabbing rocks to see how much it would take to hold me down and it seemed to take an awfully big rock. While swimming on the surface I saw some black and yellow striped angel fish, and a spectacular fish I think is an emperor angel fish. It was black with one white stripe in the middle, day-glo orange yellow and blue trim around the edges. On another dive I found an interesting sponge on a rock. It looked like a mat of club moss that was done up in day-glow blues and purples.
As we paddled south after lunch we saw large whales humping out in the sea of Cortez and heard them blowing. At the place we were originally planning to stop to camp, Jean landed and stood next to a whale skull that was almost taller than her and longer than her boat. Unfortunately that beach was difficult to land on and nobody else went to shore. We had to keep going until almost 6:00 PM again before we landed and started setting up camp.
In those last few extra miles I twice heard something exhale near me and looked up in time to see the head of a sea turtle. On several of the beaches we found the empty shells of these animals. Bob kept seeing flocks of manta rays flying by just under the water. I only got one glimpse of them banking away from us under water, but several times I saw their wingtips waving out of the surface from a distance.
One place we considered landed at had a jumble of large rocks that been worn thin near the water level until they looked like a fleet of aircraft carriers. One was only a meter wide at the base and four meters wide across the top. I called this the “ship rock” area. We never did find a good gavel or sand beach to land on and eventually had to land on a slippery cobble beach anyway. This meant dragging or carrying the boats up the slippery dangerous wet area then carrying them still farther over the dry cobblestones to get above the high tide. It would have been a lot easier if we could have arranged to have high tides when we landed or launched. However, a low tide in the evening also meant that we had a nearly full moon to admire at night.
Every time we landed at any beach, Penny went beach-combing to look for shells or interesting bones. On this beach, with her usual harvest of shells, she came back with a kilo brick of partially composted marijuana. Then she walked the other way up the beach and came back with two more kilos. We figured someone dumped them overboard when the federalies came to board their boat. We had a big campfire that evening and burned all three bricks as if they were presto-logs. Burning it like this nobody got high from the campfire smoke, even though some of us tried standing down wind and taking deep breaths. I figure the campfire was too hot and burned the active ingredient. We estimated that the street value of our bonfire might have been in the tens of thousands of dollars. The next morning, Penny found yet another kilo brick, and we just left it there. We named this place “Four Kilo Beach”.
