Blowin' in the wind

We are sitting out a big blow from the north at San Bruno, north of Loreto. San Bruno is nothing you would dream about. It's sort of a hell hole of a fish camp with the heads of decapitated manta rays laying all over the place and a few pangas pulled up on the beach. But let me tell you we like it just fine because the hillocks on the point (an andesite flow planed off by a Pleistocene wave-cut terrace, to be precise) are affording us from protection from the wind. You can't trust this Baja weather. It can turn in a heartbeat. A day can make all the difference in the world. The day before yesterday, we were sailing down the coast at 2 knots with all the sails up about 100 m off a lee shore, just poking along looking at the rocks, a beautiful cross-section of a rhyolite dome where the viscous lava had smooshed up over some white block and ash flows and then on top of all the light-colored rhyolite layers and layers of black and dark red basalt scoria and thin flows. The conditions were so benign we could have hopped out and swum alongside the boat. We pulled into Bahia el Mangle (meaning 'mangrove') about 3 PM in the afternoon and scoped it out for sitting out the norther that was predicted for that night or the next day. The harbor looked good but besides the abandoned partially constructed hotel and two abandoned houses there was no evidence that anyone goes in or out by the road. We didn't want to get stuck there in a blow and get to Loreto late to pick up Peter, who is coming in on Friday, Feb 26 to sail with us. I was being lazy and didn't want to go any farther. Tim decided we should. So we put the sails back up and poked on down to San Bruno, arriving at about 6 PM, a little before sunset. And it was none too pretty. Tim said sometimes you have to sacrifice aesthetics for protection. A fisherman and his son drove up as we thought about parking there for several days. They had a teeny little aluminum skiff they were about to launch in order to fish all night. We asked them what they knew about the weather. Predictably, they didn't know anything. We asked them if they had heard if it was going to blow. The fisherman looked out at the water and said, "It's calm." These guys live in the moment. Tim told me to ask him if we would be protected from a big north wind if we moved our boat a little farther down the beach. I told Tim, "Look, these guys are going out fishing all night in a 12 ft skiff. They are just going to laugh at us worried about moving our boat 50 ft." So we moved the boat. The guys went out fishing. They came back in around midnight. The wind started blowing like fury at 3 AM. And at 7 AM I looked out the tent to see Tim bare naked moving the boat back up the beach.

I am in Loreto right now. You may wonder how I got here since the boat is 20 miles up the coast. Yesterday AM Tim walked 4 miles out to the highway and hitched back up to Bahia Coyote, where we left the car. He drove back down with the trailer. At high tide last night, around 9 PM, we thought we'd pull the boat out of the water so we could go into Loreto and run errands without leaving somebody tending the boat up at San Bruno. However, come 9 PM, we had a failure of nerve. The boat was bucking like a bronco and it was dark and we were cold and it just looked impossible for the two of us to get the boat on the trailer without causing ourselves harm. Today, the winds have backed off a bit (enough to fool some cruisers into making the passage from San Juanico to Puerto Ballandra on Isla Carmen, bucking some huge rollers and likely causing some unhappiness among the crew).

A few days back we anchored in a cove on the south side of Punta el Pulpito, a looming point that juts out into the Gulf and messes with the currents and the winds. Some years ago, several students on an Outward Bound course died as they tried to kayak around el Pulpito in a norther. One of the crusing guides we are carrying refers to the "obsidian vein" on the south side of the point. Ha, they should have asked ME. Obsidian vein, my you-know-what. The whole thing is made up of rhyolite lava flows that are still totally glassy and therefore black. Obsidian is volcanic glass. We hiked to the top of el Pulpito (which seems to mean 'the pulpit' but in Spain would mean 'little octupus') and got an incredible 360 degree view. NOLS has their students camp up there in calm conditions. We had the calm but my knee has been killing me for some reason, so we opted to stay in the boat. The boulders on shore were giant rounded blocks of volcanic glass and wobbly. Not good for making camp. We left the cove after two nights there and sailed down to a small cove with a stretch of white beach called La Ramada Cove on some maps and Caleta Almeja (Clam Cove) on others. There were three boats that arrived before us but we sailed past all of them and anchored in the primo spot in two feet of water and made camp on a beach backed by low cliffs of mocha-colored rhyolite block flows. Mind blower of a camp. We weren't there long before I set off on a little walk. I wasn't gone five minutes before Tim was whistling and calling me back. I couldn't figure out why. He said, "You'll never guess who just showed up on the beach. Markes Johnson." Markes Johnson is a professor of geology at Williams College who has written extensively on the Pliocene marine deposits of the Sea of Cortez. I have been reading his papers this whole trip. Tim noticed this bunch of people in engineered clothing (Anne's term) peering quizzically at the rocks. "You must be geologists," he said. Markes introduced himself and Tim recognized the name. I told him, "I read part of your book about Punta Chivato." One of his colleagues laughed and said, "Only part of it?" "Well, the guy I borrowed if from on Coyote Beach wanted it back." Markes was there with his wife, also a geologist, a geophysicist who lives in Loreto, and two colleagues from Lisbon, Portugal. He said his Mexican colleague, Jorge Ledesma, was back at the house where they were staying. It turns out they were staying at one of about three houses on Bahia San Juanico, the next bay down, a favorite stop of cruisers and sea kayakers. It oughta be a national park. It is so striking. I mentioned that I'd like to see Jorge, not having connected since 1993 at a meeting in Ensenada. They invited us to the house, saying "You have to see the house." We drove over with them to find that they were staying in a magnificent home built by a Spanish marquesa but now owned by an American developer, who has an interest in geology and invited them there for a couple days to see the geology. Well, one thing led to another and the owner, Tom Woolard, invited us for dinner. He had a chef and staff there at the house (which has a long narrow mosaic pool on the vast patio fronting the bay). They were preparing cabrito (baby goat) with a panoply of chile sauces for the guests. We sat down (us salty dogs, encrusted with two weeks of salt) to a huge square table on the patio covered with a giant white cloth. We were offered sangria, red or white wine, cold beer, as well as the cabrito and beans, tortillas, chile, and chopped lettuce. About 8 PM, we remembered we had just up and left out camp, totally unsecured, and didn't even think to bring a flashlight. Somebody lent us one and off we trooped, picking our way back to camp in a tiny spot of light over boulders awash at high tide. We got back to camp, and I sat down in a chair, looked out at our lovely little bay and said, "That just happened for a reason. I don't know what it was yet, but that was not an accident. If Tim had gone fishing five minutes earlier, we would never have made that connection." If we had been any number of decisions differently, we would not have made that connection. Jorge Ledesma had recognized me immediately. We hadn't seen each other in 17 years. We chatted about Baja geology at dinner and I told him about some curious cobbles I had seen on a beach up the coast. He told me about a fault near those cobbles that brought that rock to the surface. I told him about some marine beds I saw on Isla San Marcos and he told me about some at San Ignacio that show that there was a trans-peninsular seaway 12 million years ago that connected the northern Gulf with the Pacific before the southern Gulf had even begun to form. He put so many ideas into my head, it's still spinning. He told me about outcrops I have to visit on the islands off Loreto, places we'll go with Peter this next week. The fun just doesn't stop.

Have to go do laundry now. Believe me, I HAVE to do laundry. Had lunch at McLulu's Tacos. Baja fish tacos. Got our permits for camping on the islands in the marine park. Once we do some shopping and pick up Pete, we'll be ready to sail up to Isla Coronados, a Pleistocene volcano (really young, probably has flows a few thousand years old) with a fossil marine bay on its south end.

One more thing. We were invited to a beach potluck the other night at Bahia San Juanico. We didn't have a way to get there as we have no dinghy. Our friend George had said that everybody wanted to meet us. I told Tim that we'd see just how much they wanted to meet us. And a little while later a couple of dikes from Nova Scotia came around the corner making a hullaballoo to pick us up. We laughed all the way there and all the way back. They said something that captured my fancy, "There is no bad weather, just inadequate clothing." Something somebody from Canada would say.