Cruise Log #32, Isla Coronados, Puerto Escondido, Bahía Concepción and on to Santa Rosalía
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More civilization than we're used to....
Updated July 4th, 2006
SolMate's route from Loreto (twice) to Santa Rosalía, via Bahía Concepción.
This 200-mile leg we've seen alot more civilization than usual...for us, anyway.
About 110 cruising boats gathered in Puerto Escondido the first week of May for
Loreto Fest. SolMate hung around the harbor a couple days after the festivities
to rendezvous with Nakia. On their arrival, John and Linda filled up Nakia's
water tanks at the Puerto Escondido spigot (an entertaining account of which you can
find on their BLOG at http://www.geocities.com/svnakia/). The next day we both headed
out on a leisurely 12-mile sail to Loreto.
The 10th of May was Mother's Day in Mexico...a school holiday, no less. Free from
school, Loreto's 12-year-old entrepreneurs were down at the dinghy dock, hustling
Americano cruisers. They were a happy-go-lucky lot, and "guarded" our dinghy for a couple pesos
apiece, jostling and yucking it up during their intense negotiations with John and Stan, who
harassed them about not helping their mothers at home on Mothers' Day, and who also
told them to go buy their mothers presents with their tips. The kids ignored the
advice - or was it our bad Spanish? Regardless, the little hoodlums were much more
interested in swimming off the breakwall than guarding dinghies, and half the time they
forgot to come back and collect their tips.
From up front and personal encounters with the local kids we moved on to an up front and
personal encounter with the local fauna...a not too pleasant one.
Seven miles north of Loreto, anchored at little Isla Coronados, where we hiked and
snorkeled for three days, we were suddenly driven away.
Anchorage and hiking trails on
Isla Coronados - MJ slogging uphill.
Apparently, mid May is spawning season for squid, and Isla Coronados is where a bazillion of them honeymoon...and then die...and then wash up on the beach...and then putrefy. Of the half dozen boats at the island, all upped anchor to escape the sudden stench, three left the island, but three of us simply moved over a quarter mile (toward the tip of the finger in the picture above), out of the direct line of floating bodies. Amazingly, that's all it took, and we were glad we stayed at the island because the live squid were hitting the squid-jig left and right...barbecued squid was mighty tasty marinated in soy sauce and lime juice.
Squid littering the Isla Coronados
beach and floating on the water.
Even in remote anchorages, our increased confidence with the language has opened up our view of life on the Baja. While hiking to the top of Punta Pulpito with Ron on Shea La Vie, we ran into a group of fishermen/builders and detoured off the path to talk to them (something we've been much too shy to do, here-to-fore, because of our meager language skills). Ron, too, has been studying Spanish and amongst the three of us we managed a pretty good conversation about the fishing, about the house they were building out in the middle of nowhere for a Norte Americano, and about the beautiful scenery in that stark part of the Sea.
Stan and Ron on the road to Punta Pulpito.
Fishermen's blue plastic shelters next to
a house in progress
on the road to Punta Pulpito.
At Los Pilares, another remote anchorage, Stan and Ron again set out
to discover more about the people staying there. They got a real surprise chatting
with the two guys camped in a make-shift palapa in that tiny, out of the way cove boasting
nothing but cactus and sea for miles and miles, and no roads. Expecting another set of
fishermen, but seeing no boats, nets or lines, our heroes played twenty questions
in their best broken Spanish. They discovered that the local guys were in the Army on the lookout
for drug smugglers. As the four conversed, the Army guys were also able to
convey that this was a pretty cushy job for them, they got to swim and fish all day
and occasionally wandered to the top of their rocky knoll with binoculars. Also, even though
they were from the southern state of Chiapas, their
families were housed in nearby Guerrero Negro, within weekly commuting distance.
With our new confidence speaking broken Spanish, we're learning more about what's going
on around us. As we turned the corner into Bahia Concepcion, however, we reverted back
to the mother tongue - the bay is chock-full of Norte Americanos, some camping, some
snowbirding and some living there all year round.
Geary, our Sonrisa Net weather man, is one of those all-year people who lives in a palapa in El Burro Cove, inside Bahía Concepción. When Shea La Vie and SolMate arrived in El Burro, we immediately loaded up a couple of beers and paid Geary a visit. Since he's been living in El Burro for eleven years, we were particularly interested to hear his recommendations on sights to see around the bay.
Geary (4th of July, 2005).
A hike Geary recommended, straight up the hill behind his palapa, included petroglyphs and bell rocks (picture Ron with a stone in each hand beating out Ina Gauda de Vida on a huge volcanic rock that rings like a chime).
Ron and MJ playing the rocks above El Burro Cove.
Civilized today, civilized thousands of years ago... Bahía Concepción
Rock art.
After touring the bay, we also found some
interesting Punta Chivato trails listed in Stan's geology book. Punta Chivato is the
promontory just north of Bahía Concepción. It's also inhabited by Norte
Americanos, as well as thousands of years worth of fossils and the most awesome
shell beach we've ever encountered.
By the time we reached Chivato, we had toured all of Bahía Concepción, Ron
had parted company to park Shea La Vie for the summer in San Carlos...to return to work in
Seattle, and John and Linda on Nakia had rejoined our happy little cruising party.
