December 12, Monday
We met at 5:00 AM, loaded the kayaks and gear, and were underway by 6:00. We were lucky thirteen on the trip: Mikey, Candice, 'Ippy, Francisco (Frank "the Tank"), Sven, Steven, Mayuko, Dan, Yuki, Susanne, Shirley, Patrice, and myself. We drove all that day down the Baja Peninsula. The road south of Ensenada gets very chancy indeed. The further south down the peninsula from there, the more primitive the conditions. Villages consist of a few shacks. There is no electricity down the peninsula except from gas-powered generators. And no hospitals for hundreds of miles. It is worth noting here that I have never, ever seen such crazy, Dr.-Seuss-looking cacti in all my born days. Theodore Geisel grew up in La Jolla not too far to the north, and there is no doubt in my mind that he traveled down here and was influenced by these crazy plants. Joshua trees and ocotillos are strange beasts, but they have nothing on these babies.

We ate dinner at a restaurant (Las Hamacas) in the town of Bahia, then set up camp on the beach of the Bahia de Los Angeles. The sky was incredibly clear down there, and this part of the globe was enjoying the geminid meteor shower at the time; we saw several shooting stars.

Dec 13, Tuesday
We spent the first half of the day playing around in the kayaks in the extremely sheltered Bahia. Then about midafternoon we loaded all the gear -- and water, for there was no fresh water on any of these islands -- onto the kayaks, and started across to Smith Island, one of several uninhabited islands in the Bay of L.A.. All these islands are amazingly beautiful; the sun coming up and shining across the clear water, over the pink mountains on the other islands which dot the seascape... it takes your breath away.

The van was left in the care of the noble and trustworthy Don Roberto, the most powerful man in the fishing village (about five shacks). It is possibly worth noting here that although among us only Frank spoke Spanish, he didn't bother translating for us most of the time, since no one minded that communication was primitive, and the language barrier was no obstacle to the Mexicans' overwhelming friendliness.

We got to the island just before nightfall, and set up camp. Our camp was on the beach of a double lagoon, a lagoon within a lagoon separated from the main lagoon by an arm of clean sand, the whole system cut off from the sea by a wall of rocks. Just on the other side of our camp was the opposite side of the island and open water. Frank capsized on the crossing, but was fished out without much trouble. Shooting stars at night.

Dec 14, Wednesday
We paddled against a fairly stiff wind up to the farthest point of the island and the foot of an extinct volcano. We all set out to climb it. Shirley turned back almost immediately. About three-quarters of the way up Frank, Patrice, and I turned back as well, laziness and windiness having gotten the better of us. We spent the next couple of hours sunbathing, snorkeling, and collecting pretty sea-shells. The others got back down about a half-hour before sunset, exhausted and battered from the climb. There wasn't even a crater up there anymore, the volcano was so old.

There was not much time to spare before nightfall, so we instantly set out back to camp. Frank capsized in the rather rough seas, and this time his rescue was trickier. I was closest to him. He went in and less than a second later five feet of water separated him from his kayak. He started swimming towards it and after about four strokes was fifteen feet away from it. The wind was quite strong, the waves were high, and both he and the kayak (at very different speeds) were being pushed towards rocks. I got to him and pulled him atop my kayak with my paddle. 'Ippy got Frank's kayak and towed it over, and Mikey choreographed the rather complicated machinations necessary to get our large friend back into his kayak without capsizing us both. Touch and go for a moment or two, but it ended happily. We got back to camp well after dark, all very cold and wet.

This was the peak night of the geminids, and the shooting stars were just spectacular, burning long and vivid trails across the sky. I had never seen anything like it.

Dec 15, Thursday
It seemed as though the wind had calmed in the morning. In the Sea of Cortez, the typical weather pattern is five days of wind followed by five days of calm, repeated cyclically. We guessed that the five days of calm had begun.

Therefore a hardy group of six -- Mikey, 'Ippy, Frank, Dan, Patrice and myself -- set out for a very long paddle downwind to Isla de la Ventana, an island with a large stone arch under which, tides permitting, it is possible to take a kayak. Just another example of the breathtaking beauty of the natural wonders of the region.

While the other seven members of the group made plans to snorkel at the opposite end of the island from the previous day's explorations, we brave few set out. As we skimmed along over the waves, the wind began to pick up a hell of a lot, proving that the calm cycle had not yet begun. We reached the arch, but the tides were not such that we could go through the ventana itself. We tried to take pictures from upwind of it, but the waves were not conducive to that kind of thing, and, in fact, the wind by now was so strong that we would paddle up fifty yards from the arch, bend forward to spend five seconds fumbling with the straps of the dry-bag containing the camera, then look up (without yet having opened the bag) to find that we were shooting straight past the arch towards rocks. We turned around to head back to our island, all of us hungry and ready for lunch.

About ten minutes into the return it was obvious that some of us were not going to make it without a break, so Mikey headed us toward what we called Flat Rock Island, basically a pile of boulders about sixty or seventy yards long, ten yards across, flat, sticking up a few feet out of the water. It lay slightly less than half-way back to our island. As we paddled, the wind kept growing stronger and stronger. It took us two hours to make the island, and Patrice really almost didn't make it. We huddled on the leeward side for almost an hour, trying to stay as well out of the wind as possible, and ate all the gorp and power bars we had brought. We took pictures of the arch from there. Our stay on the islet was very much to the dismay and anger of the seagulls who made it their home, and who clearly wanted to kill us.

Finally we set out again, this time with Patrice's kayak tied with a tow line behind mine. If the winds had been only as strong as when we first landed on Flat Rock this arrangement would have worked and we would have made it back to Smith, but the waves and wind were much much stronger even than before. I was making a little headway, Mikey and 'Ippy were doing alright, Dan and Frank were struggling along behind -- for all of a minute. Then the tow line actually snapped, and Patrice fell away behind me like she was falling down a well. It was all she could do to get back to the sheltered side of the island. In fact, it was all I could do to make a landing on the windward side. Frank barely made it back as well. We pulled the kayaks up once we were all back on Flat Rock, and prepared to wait until the sun set, an hour or two after which the wind was sure to die down.

On the middle of the island was a pool of water surrounded by a sort of barnacley sand. This was the only break in the piles of boulders of which the island was made, and lay in a circular depression about thirty feet in diameter, almost sheltered from the wind. Over the course of the first hour of our stay there the water drained out of the pool with the lowering of the tides, leaving a sandy arena. We waited it out there, again to the extreme horror of the seagulls. They hovered dangerously in screaming flocks just over our heads, threatening us with imminent annihilation for quite some time before they finally retired to a more comfortable distance. They would periodically revive their attempts to drive us from their home, but as we had no way of complying with their wishes we did our best to ignore them, and they never actually attacked.

Exploring the island, Dan found something which made our stay closer to bearable -- a mostly inflated soccer ball. We were able to find three pieces of driftwood large enough to be used as bats, one of which did not splinter after two or three uses (a bit thorny but what could we do?) and we made up a game which we played in a spirit of fierce competition, but without keeping score, until nightfall. On a desert island with no shelter, it gets cold at night. To stay warm we jogged around our sandy arena in the dark or did calisthenics, playing word games in a spirit of fierce competition to keep our minds off our plight. There can be no greater bonding experience than playing Botticelli on a desert island while stranded with no food and almost no water remaining. Finally the wind died down enough that we could make the crossing. A few white caps remained, but nothing too difficult.

When paddling one is always warm, and that crossing, under the nearly full moon that finally consented to rise, was like a pleasant dream after our experience during the day. The others, worried but not yet panicking for us, had set up a lantern at the mouth of our lagoon to guide us to the right part of the island; this served not merely to guide us but also to reassure us. It was a beacon beckoning us home, a promise of warm food and of respite from hard and desperate labor. The others had held off on dinner, waiting for us, for which we were grateful. We slept soundly that night.

Dec 16 This was a day of rest not only for us castaways but for everyone. The wind was even stronger than the day before, and no one could have gone out on the kayaks even if they had wanted to. This was a tent knocking-down wind -- only my tent withstood the gusts, being the only dome. We managed a slight hike down towards the point opposite the volcano, but mostly we all slept or played at dice. After sunset the wind died down almost immediately, leaving utter calm behind it. The moon was now full, and that moonlight paddle was the most pleasant yet, despite the fact that we were loaded down with all our gear. Riding those gentle swells was like being a flea on the back of some gargantuan sleeping beast, one which might at any time awaken. Our landing, however, was somewhat awful, being absolutely freezing. With weak and trembling fingers we set up camp, built a fire and prepared our bean burritos.

Dec 17 We were up before the dawn and packing everything away. As we started our drive toward the "main" road, we passed many vultures perched on the tops of tall cacti with wings fully outspread, like living totem poles. Apparently they were not displaying but rather warming their wingbones, preparing for the first flight of the day.

The border guards were amazed to see such a motley, bearded, stinky crew driving a van with government plates, and interrogated us fiercely to make sure we weren't smuggling contraband whale skulls, when finally we reached the US after nightfall.

Return to Archived Trip Records

Return to Outdoors Web

Return to Homesite