All these terrible plans were wasted when we got up before dawn and discovered a calm day with practically no wind. We rushed to finish packing by sunrise and dashed across to Isla San Lorenzo quickly in case the wind came back up. But it did not and we made it across in only three hours, averaging around 4 knots of speed!
When we reached the island it was a warm sunny day with clear water breaking on a beach made from worn granite pebbles. We skipped the first beach as being too steep and went to the next beach north for lunch. After eating we went for a walk and discovered that the next spit enclosed a lagoon of water with a red rim and millions of little flies swarming at the waters edge. We decided to look north into the wind for a camping ground where these flies cannot follow. Traveling north we stopped at another spit that did not have a lagoon. But the day was still young so we pressed on to get as far north as possible. With this good weather we hoped to complete our original plan of going to other islands farther north this week. Spending a day at the resort and another day camping on the main peninsula had put us almost two days behind the original float plan.
Isla San Lorenzo has many ospreys and we enjoyed watching them and listening to them “peep” at us from the air and the tops of cardon cacti. They build nests on rocky points and sometimes on the cacti themselves. We found one osprey nest that was only two meters off the ground in the crook of a branch of cardon cactus. Boobies flew over us all day long but we could not tell what kind they were. Eventually we came around a point and surprised a few roosting on the cliff near the water. I was so pleased to discover that they were blue-footed-boobies that I shouted the discovery out loud! This scared the birds away before John could photograph them. For the rest of the trip he shushed me every time we approached roosting birds on the cliff.
We finally settled on a cobble beach with a flat sandy gully at the top of it. I prefer to camp on gravel beaches because the gravel doesn’t stick to your clothing and follow you into your sleeping bag like sand does. So I camped close to the water in the gravel and was happy. John wasn’t convinced that I was above the high tide line, but figured if he heard me yelling in the middle of the night it would warn him to go check his boat and see if it was in danger of being washed away. John prefers to sleep on sand because it isn’t as hard as gravel, so he slept in the gully above the gravel and was happy. We figured this gully was carved by flash floods from infrequent rainstorms. If it rained in the night, I might hear John yelling on his way past me into the ocean. One reason that I can sleep on gravel is because I have my luxury edition Thermarest sleeping pad. John doesn’t trust an inflatable device (it might spring a leak) and uses closed cell foam pads that are not as thick as my Thermarest.
While we were setting up camp, another kayaker paddled by! This turned out to be John Donahue from the Monterey Bay area in California. He was paddling the entire gulf coast of Baja PLUS circumnavigating every island, and had been kayaking for a month solo already. He paddled farther north to look for another camp-able beach and we didn’t see him again until morning. I was sorry that we did not invite him to dinner with us! After dark we contacted Alberto on the VHF marine radio and arranged to call him again the next morning after the HAM radio weather report.