November 2, 2018 - A new suit and a new tie, real nice service for me when I die...

A couple of days ago I found out that 3 of the staff on this tour are named Angel - Miguel, our guide, our boat driver, and one of the cooks/boat drivers. With their singing in the kitchen and my normal propensity for calling songs to mind, I've been hearing the Headstones song "Three Angels" in heavy rotation in my brain, and the start is pretty fitting:

Three Angels, set a table for me, tonight
They know my face, they set a place, and it's for me, tonight.
Can't disappoint 'em, I think I'll join 'em, they been waiting on me forever.
I been down, on Earth and in this town, and I swear there's gotta be something better.


This was, of course, another awesome day. After a breakfast of quesidillas (new learning that suddenly makes sense - queso is cheese, therefor, these are cheese tortillas) with guacamole, fresh salsa, and frijoles (beans), it was off on the panga to swim with the sea lions.

Boating out, we skipped across really large swells, past the North Island, to the rookery.

Skipping across waves on the way to the rookery.

We attached the panga to the moorage and then dove into something out of Blue Plant, or Planet Earth. There were millions of flashing silver streaks in the water - sardines - darting about in a coreographed ballet.

Packed like sardines... A huge school of sardines.

 The school always maintained its distance from anything else: humans, air bubbles, sea lions, rocks, and other fish. Whenever something approached, the silver curtain parted, leaving a sphere of fishless water around the intruder. At times, this was the only way you could see anything, the layers of sardine were thick. I tried to shoot video of this, the various fish, and the sea lions, but have no idea if they turned out. (videos will be posted at another time, when I'm at a computer that can process them)

Sardines parting - a sealion swimming through the school.

View above water.

The sardines maintaining that distance from anything else in the water.

They maintained that distance even from rocks.

The sea lions knew we were there, but paid us little mind, swimming around us. One looked at me under water for a bit, but swam away to join its friends and family. There were a couple of times I spotted a large male pretty close, and decided to give him more room.

On the boat ride back to Candelero for lunch, Angel surfed the panga a few times, riding thee swells and cresting waves off the North of the island. I found this to be awesome, playful fun, while Erin noted nervous laughter and gave him a bit of stinkeye.

After lunch and fully packing up camp into the panga (lunch was tortillas with shredded fish and the ever present fresh fruit) we headed off South in the kayaks. We went past the Bay of the Little Skulls, where the indigenous population buried their dead children, and learned that the next bay was where they would place dead adults int he caves and, after a year, come back and paint the bones that were left (is this the origin of the designs for sugar skulls?). We took regular water breaks, had a tail wind, and got some additional push from the waves that led the way South. We went snorkeling on longer breaks, seeing one bay with huge expanses of intact coral, including a few giant brain corals. In another large bay with a number of coves we saw a huge number of sea turtles surfacing, losing count as the kept surfacing. We sat in our kayaks keeping watch and would point and let the others know each time another surfaced. After our final rest, we saw a small manta ray leaping out of the water twice, flapping in the air as though it wished to fly.

Round the point to begin heading East, we turned into a head wind, and the paddling became more strenuous. We were headed towards a sand spit, which gave a bit of shelter. Looking beyond its point I could see white capped waves and knew we would be taking a panga ride the last bit into camp.

As we landed the kayaks here, we saw the Baja Ferries boat go by. We got the kayaks ready to load onto the panga (it has a rack up top for them), and were about to put the first one onto top rack when someone shouted "stop" (or something to that effect) and the first wave of the ferry's wake hit. These waves crashed into the shore, reshaping it. The sand and rocks drained out and were deposited higher up with each crashing wave, forming a shelf in the sand. We could do nothing but keep things from washing out to sea, and wait for this to subside. The waves crashed over the panga, which Angel kept from being run aground or capsized by holding it straight into the waves.

Once the waves subsided, we loaded the kayaks and ourselves onto the boat and headed off.

The panga's engine worked hard to push us to camp against the headwind and waves, but we made it and began hanging sleeping bags and sheets to dry, while we drank margaritas and ate Veracruz fish to contentment.