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The incredulous pescador, who’d met them at the beach on a day when nobody had gone out fishing because it was too rough, shook his head and proclaimed, “No son nada normales, wey,” Y’all ain’t nothin’ normal. It had become a private joke and somewhat of a rallying cry for our trio, but whether we were coalescing into a team like three musketeers or more like three stooges was still up for discussion.
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Alone on the remote span of beach called Bahia San Hipolito. |
Later that evening, as we prepared for bed in the processing plant, cousin Vincente showed up with his seven-year-old son Noél. Both looked dressed for snow, in heavy, hooded parkas. Outside the wind continued to moan in the radio antenna wires. It was a bad sign that the winds were still blowing so hard after dark.
Vincente explained in a mix of English and Spanish that his son had wanted to know how big the kayaks were that his uncle and the two gringos were paddling. “So I tell him, ‘Let’s go to see.’” I followed the conversation in Spanish as Vincente, who had only just seen the kayak a few hours earlier, described the intricacies of the boat to his son like an expert instructor, having asked all the same questions of Pancho that afternoon. He explained to Noél the use of the timon, rudder, and how it is controlled with the pedales to make the boat turn. Noél peeked his head inside the cockpit and nodded sagely. Although only seven and having never seen a kayak, he seemed to understand boats instinctively.
When Noél asked about the motór, Vincente demonstrated how to hold the paddle with a wide grip for more leverage, placing the shaft across the top of his head and spreading his hands until his elbows were at 90 degrees, as Pancho had shown him. Then he explained how to use torso rotation for more power, instead of a bicycling motion with just your arms.
As instructors, Chris and I were impressed by how quickly he’d picked up important paddling concepts without ever having been in a kayak. Vincente’s evident respect for us had mostly dispelled any notions that we might be abnormal, and he was looking at the kayak as if he might actually like to try one, someday. Yet he knew that his someday would probably never come. Pancho was single when he quit fishing, and Vincente had a wife and son to -support.
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Illustration by Christopher Hoyt. |
The look on Noél’s face, however, showed pure respect. Respect for his father, whom Noél was still young enough to believe as all-knowing, and respect too for the kayak and for his uncle Pancho. For Noél, all things were still possible, and suddenly kayak guide was on his radar along with abalone diver, policeman or maybe fisheries biologist as a possible career option. Vincente excused himself—it was his night to patrol for poachers—after reminding us that if the wind was still up in the morning, we’d be welcome to stay as long as we needed.
The next morning, day four of the trip, the wind had dropped enough that both we and the abalone fishers launched from the beach without much trouble. Five miles later, we rounded the broad, curving bluffs at Punta San Hipólito, pausing to note the small village tucked behind a sheltered sand beach, but continued on, looking forward to our first night away from a town.
A gentle curve of cream-colored sand stretched southeast to the horizon, disappearing into the haze toward the next point at La Bocana, 25 miles distant. We decided to split the difference and paddle another 12 miles or so before landing, but the farther we paddled from the people of the pueblo, the farther we paddled from the protection of the point. At our position in mid-bay, the beach we had chosen for our landing was angled for a direct hit from the ocean swell.
For sea kayakers, the bad thing about swells stretched so far apart is not so much their height but the volume of water they carry. Eight-foot waves at eight seconds, about the biggest I’d seen in a dozen years of leading winter trips on the Sea of Cortez, were featherweights in comparison to the long, fat eight footers surging upward as they hit the shallow water and slammed onto the Vizcaíno sand before us every 17 seconds or so.
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Perfect weather for crossing the 18 miles from Punta Abreojos to Laguna San Ignacio. |
The good news was that the longer period swells gave us more time to sprint through the impact zone to shore, although “sprinting” in a fully loaded sea kayak at the end of a 16-mile day is definitely a relative term. We spread out along the water’s edge, giving each other room so we wouldn’t run over one another during the landing. We waited dry-mouthed as wall after wall of double-overhead dumpers pummeled the impact zone. Then, finally, a set of smaller waves, gave us our window of opportunity. We all sprinted for shore.
Each of us sneaked through the impact zone unscathed, then side-surfed through the soup zone of broken waves and onto the sand on a foaming four-footer. To the south of us, many miles down the beach, was another rocky point. In the lee of the point huddled, undoubtedly, another modestly successful fishing village, and beneath the sea, a healthy population of abalone covered the rocks—some tiny as thumbnails, others the size of plates and ripe for the harvesting. Peering out of little caves and crevices among the abalone-covered rocks, lobster waited for nightfall to feed. In front of us, all along our beach, an endless supply of waves maintained its steady beat all through the night onto the empty sand.
After a challenging and somewhat dicey (yet ultimately uneventful) launch through the large, mid-bay breakers the following morning, we chose landing sites in the lee of points the next two nights: first in La Bocana, where we spent the night with Pancho’s compadre (literally “godfather,” although it is Pancho who is godfather to the man’s son), then camping again the following night in the wind and sand on the beach to the east of the town of Abreojos.
“Let’s start crossing at that next point,” Pancho directed Chris and me on the next to last morning of our expedition, about 20 minutes after launching. It would be our longest crossing yet: 17 miles of open sea from our camp near Punta Abreojos to the mouth of San Ignacio Lagoon.
Behind us to our left, the low, whitish-yellow bluffs backing the beach gave way to a wide, gently rising sage brush-speckled plain, walled in along the distant, northern horizon by a sudden range of umber mesas. Before our bows and to the right, the sandy bluffs were punctuated here and there by a series of low points of dark, volcanic rock, each stretching seaward and marked by foaming white reef breaks.
Several miles away, where the bay’s gentle curve began to bend back to the south, the last rocky exclamation point melted again into yet another endless swath of low dunes and white sand beach that stretched forever southward and disappeared like a mirage into the sea haze.
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Pancho Mayoral along the rugged coast just south of Bahia Tortugas. |
It was Pancho’s idea to beeline across the bay rather than contour well over 20 miles along shore, even though it would take us nearly 10 miles out to sea. With little more than five miles of visibility, we couldn’t begin to see the far shore through the haze, yet Pancho took no bearing—not with his compass, at least. There was no arrogance in this. He simply didn’t need to. After spending half his life finding his way home from sea, he seemed to feel it in his bones, like a migratory bird. He’d found the boca, the mouth or channel, into San Ignacio Lagoon literally hundreds of times over the dozen or so years since he started fishing. Although Chris and I had years more expedition experience than he did, we’d gained total faith in Pancho’s knowledge of his home waters, so we followed him, blindly, without hesitation, out to sea.
After two hours of paddling, nodding off to the left of our bows, lips curling into that sly half smile, Pancho said, “There it is—Médano Amarillo.” A single large yellow dune, still maybe 10 miles distant, had begun to materialize out of the shoreline mists, a local landmark and beacon marking the mouth of the lagoon. We adjusted our course a few degrees, set our bows beneath the dune and followed Pancho home.
Roger Schumann is a regular contributor to Sea Kayaker and author of two books on kayaking: Sea Kayak Rescue and Sea Kayaking Guide to Central and Northern California. An ACA Instructor Trainer, he spends winters in Baja leading kayaking classes and tours and teaching courses in marine natural history with Prescott College. He can be reached via email at: info@eskapekayak.com
Guiding provided by: pachicosecotours.com |
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