Bahia de los Angeles, (October 14, 2010)
Thursday, October 14, 2010
I was up by 6.30am, after nearly 12 hours on my sleeping pad. The tide had come up quite high and the rear of the kayak was floating. It could not go anywhere, though, because I had secured in before I went to sleep. I must have been bitten at least a million times by no-seeums; my feet, legs, arms, shoulders and face are covered in small little bites which already itch terribly. This is going to be pretty unpleasant.
The bees were out in full force again; there seemed to be even more than yesterday. At some point I could not get to my water bottle because the whole top half was covered in bees and I had to make a cup of very strongly sweetened water to give them an alternative so that 15 minutes later I could retrieve the bottle which I then immediately rinsed very well in the sea water to remove all traces of sugar from the outside.
I was packing the boat ready for the return paddle to Bahia de los Angeles when a panga with two fishermen came in to the cove. It was clear what they were going to do; clean their catch of fish and leave the offal on the beach. They did not take very long but the gulls were already congregating in numbers and were squabbling before the panga had even left.
There was quite a racket going on once the birds had the beach to themselves, so I walked over to see what all the excitement was about. It turned out to be the head and intestines of a shark. The head did not get too much attention but there were several tugs of war going on with the intestines, some of it in the water while other pieces were fought over on the beach. I was able to get some good video of the action. I could get quite close because the birds had only eyes for the remains of the fish and took no notice of me at all.
Just after 9.00am I was on the water. The wind had largely died down and I had a leisurely paddle back to Campo Archelon where I arrived after 90 minutes in very hot weather. I checked the temperature and it was around 100F. I got settled in, took a shower and washed my clothes and then I went to look for Antonio to get my car keys. Antonio was not there; he had left a note on my car window explaining that he had to go to Tijuana unexpectedly to meet his sister’s daughter and that he would not be back this weekend. The keys were at “Gloria’s”.
After I got the keys, sorted my stuff in the palapa a little more, I went back to “Rachel and Larry” for a tuna sandwich lunch, a chance to check e-mail, re-charge my laptop and get the weather information I needed for the next leg of the trip.
The best site which I had found for the wind was “off line” so I checked for others. I did find one or two but the information was so high level that I could not really do much with it. The one thing, though, that gave me hope was that they confirmed for Friday and Saturday what I had found on the earlier site about one week ago: Friday and Saturday were going to be very calm; both days there was going to be west wind at only 2 knots per hour.
Larry kept coming to talk to me about the crossing and in passing mentioned that every year a paddler was lost in their area. I explained to him the same things that I had explained to Antonio a few days earlier and promised that I would not do anything stupid.
When I left after dinner, Betsy gave me one last word of advice about the wind and then said “we’ll expect you back in about two weeks”.