Baja Day 3: Whale Watching & Island Exploration
This is the events of our second full day of the expedition. All photos from this day can be found here. The daily expedition report is also available.
On day 3, we woke to an incredibly foggy morning. Fog so thick it was hard to find the sun. Given that the boat turns 180 degrees with each tide change, it is hard to keep your bearings unless you also know the tide tables.
In the morning, we hoped in a Zodiac and went cruising for gray whales. The area that we are in is both breeding and calving grounds. As such, we saw a number of mother/child pairs. The animals are both quite playful and curious. The adult female whale will often be upwards of 50 feet in length! Big animals! Makes you feel damned small when one surfaces next to your boat.
In particular, the large whales would often stick their noses straight out of the water. In one instance, a whale stuck at least 10 feet of itself straight up in front of our boat. Unfortunately, I was unable to snap a photo. This behavior is called “spy hopping” and the whale’s eye will often come above the surface of the water.
The grays are a very peaceful species. Now. When hunted, they were known to quite handily destroy boats. Interesting to be reminded of this while floating amongst these giants in a comparatively tiny inflatable boat.
After watching the whales for a while, we then headed over to “three dead shark” beach. Roger named it that as a fisherman had harvested three sharks, a turtle (illegal) and a ray on the beach, rudely leaving the carcasses to rot. The beach was covered with all kinds of treasures; crabs, small bones, shells, snails and neat plants.
The beach led into the sand dunes, which were magnificent. Roger found a “spinyback spider”. Mexico has honored said species of spider with a postage stamp.
The beach was the border between the bay and a dessert with huge sand dunes. Bordering the dessert to the north is a mangrove swamp. The wind is actually pushing the dunes into the swamp (while the swamp continues to grow on the other side into the water). As a result, there were dozens of trees along the edge that were buried in sand dunes.
In the afternoon, we did more of the same — whale watching and then beach walking. The only difference was the tide. It was low tide when we were out in the afternoon. There is a many foot difference in tide levels here such that there was a hundred yards or so of additional exposed beach.
There were hundreds of sand crabs wandering about, doing their crabby thing. The crabs roll little balls of sand between their claws, sucking any nutrients from the ball as it is rolled.
There were millions of little crab made sand balls along the shore at low tide. And hundreds of crabs.
We headed back to the boat near sunset. There were hundreds of birds roosting for the evening in the mangrove swamp between our zodiac and the setting sun. That night, a restaurant hauled in a feast of local foods for our enjoyment. And enjoy we did! They served home made tortillas, rice and beans, salsa, plain lobster, lobster diablo and an absolutely beautiful presentation of red snapper. The fish was effectively butterflied, then baked with a wonderful light sauce. Stellar.