The Baja Paddle

The day was rather overcast and it looked like rain. The sun was not coming through the clouds at all, but the temperature was very nice for paddling; rather cool but no wind to speak of.

I had an ebb tide departure, which meant putting Samoset on the cart and dragging it across 20ft of rocks to get it to a sandbank to start loading.

As I was carrying my stuff to the kayak, I noticed that the water was not receding any further, and shortly thereafter I saw the water rising; a very quick change of the tides was taking place here and I needed to rush to get everything packed away before the kayak started floating while still on the cart.

I barely managed to get this done, having the hardest time tying the cart on the rear deck of the kayak while at the same time keeping the kayak from floating away. This reminded me of the day of our departure when our friend Harry stood in rising water for about 45 minutes until we finally had everything loaded.

I followed the shoreline although it was not very interesting. I fall into an easy rhythm which my body seemed to accept; no signals of distress to the brain yet.

Suddenly I was surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of tufted grebes. All these little heads on thin, short necks on plump little bodies all around me. As I paddled through them they did their little dives and popped up a little further on. Some tried to fly and when they did this they were really comical. With a lot of noise, they flapped their wings and ran like crazy with their little feet pounding the surface of the water in a mostly vain attempt at flying. For some reason they just did not seem to lift themselves off the water and mostly they just flapped and ran, then sat on the water again, or dived. When they were in a large group and a little spread out, they looked like dominoes, one after the other in a very fast manner, they disappeared beneath the surface of the water, to pop up somewhere else a little bit later.

Although I took it easy, my body started hurting and I looked for a beach to take a break. The shore was not only deadly uninteresting, it was pebbles and rocks only. I paddled for 3.5 hours before I finally found a sandy beach on which to relax and stretch.

This beach was very different from most beaches. It was a real graveyard for dolphins. In a space of a few hundred feet I found at least thirty dolphin skulls. Vertebrae and ribs are innumerable and I even found a few rather much intact backbones, some still with some ribs attached.

The beach did not look like it was being visited very often; no tire tracks, no footprints. It did not have the feeling of a slaughterhouse for dolphins, rather it seemed like a beach where a lot of debris washes up on shore. A lot of the bones were brittle and weathered.

There was much more than only dolphin remains, although those remains were the vast majority. I started collecting bones, vertebrae and skulls for Martijn and in the end had so much that I knew it would be impossible to take even a fraction of what I had collected. I decided to keep one skull and some vertebrae and discard the rest.

If Martijn was here with me, he would have the time of his life collecting treasure.

The point was occupied by hundreds of birds; pelicans, elegant terns, gulls and various kinds of waders. I watched their antics for a while. It seems that there are always some that have an argument going.

I continued my paddle and was lucky to have a nice little swell pushing me along. It had a nice, even rhythm and I was able to surf the swell, sometimes for hundreds of feet. I was moving pretty fast with very little effort.

As I was surfing along, enjoying the ride I saw a tortoise quite close to me, then sea lions; they were becoming a very common sight.

I would like to reach San Francisquito. I took a reading on the GPS and it showed that I had only one more mile to go, as the crow flies. However, the lay of the land was such that I would have had to paddle eight miles to get there.

For most of the afternoon I was been paddling through the sky. The sky is perfectly reflected in the water. Since the surface of the water is like a mirror, it feels like I am paddling through the clouds which only move when Samoset’s bow wave floats through them.

I saw the birds flying by by looking into the water like into a mirror. It seems that the water is not there at all.

Apart from the dipping of the paddle in the water, and the dripping of the water drops on my spray skirt, there was not a sound to be heard. It seemed like nature was taking a siesta and I was not consciously paddling, either, it felt more like being on auto pilot and only being vaguely aware of the environment.

The weather was really balmy, like a late summer afternoon when one expects a brief thunderstorm to bring relief from the heat.

I noticed a slight disturbance in the water, some way off. Probably a sea lion again, but no, this was bigger. I concentrated a little more and after a short while, there it was again. It was rather far away, but it was unmistakably a whale. It lazily swam on the surface; it did not blow or make any sound at all. Then it dove. I did not see a tail showing and I did not see see a very distinctive fin, either. Also, it seemed rather small, although the latter may have been an illusion. It was crossing my bow at a distance of about one quarter of a mile. It made a few quick shallow dives and traveled further away from me. I had stopped paddling to get a better look.

After a few minutes, it surfaced, about one half of a mile away and astern from me. Then I saw it; it arched its back and brought it well above the water before it slowly disappeared into the depth. Then the tail showed and I knew for certain that this was a humpback whale.

I made my camp at Punta Ballena just north of San Francisquito. I had decided that there was no benefit in rushing into San Francisquito Bay just before the sun set. I had found a very nice beach with soft sand.

I did some beach combing before settling down for the late afternoon. I would have loved a really cold coke to cool off, but since this was not available I took a dip in the rather chilly water of the bay and let myself be sun dried. Then I did some beach combing, this time little stuff, and this is when I met Herbert.

Herbert is the name I had given to the skeleton of a booby bird which I found near my campsite. The bones were completely bleached, but it still had a lot of feathers. Initially I was only interested in the skull but when I picked it up, it turned out to be a complete skeleton. I put it down on the sand and there it sat, perfectly straight, like a still life model. I took some pictures and then put it in a safe spot, a little higher on the beach. When I left the next morning, Herbert was still sitting there, looking quite content.