After paddling a short while across the top of the island, we caught sight of the long spit, but did not see any breaks in it. About when we expected to see the gap we went in for a landing to look around. The wind was blowing from the north and fetching up waves to break on the long sandy beach. The water was electric blue over the shallow white sand here. I managed to catch a ride towards shore on these waves but my big touring kayak with its round displacement hull tried to broach. I tried to rudder with my paddle but the boat turned more and more and started heading towards John Somers and Lucy O’Brien on my right. Lucy claims that she saw difficult decisions playing across my face. She claims that I was thinking “Should I pull off this wave and miss out on a fun ride, or keep going and smack into my friends kayaks?” She claims that it looked like a difficult decision. Actually the boat made the decision for me and broached before any danger of smacking into anybody. I caught a second wave and used it to slip onto the sandy beach.
We started eating a snack and hiked across the base of the spit to look for the gap. To our surprise it was less than 200 meters from where we landed! The white sand of the beach had blended into the white sand on the other side of the gap and hidden it from us while we were on the water. Don suggested that the tide may drop soon so we should abort our snack and immediately launch, go through the gap, and paddle across the shallow lagoon on the other side before the tide drains out of it. We all launched, with John launching last and having trouble keeping his boat pointed into the waves. I waited just offshore to make sure he made it OK. When John finally launched (only by letting the waves turn his boat around and then backpedaling out to sea) he took off to try and catch up with Don and Lucy and left me behind.
As Don had pointed out, there was a shallow area in front of the gap with breaking waves that we might want to avoid. Everyone went way around this and then they kept going, and going, and going. I looked back over my shoulder and saw the gap BEHIND me. I shouted to John “WHERE ARE YOU GOING?” but all he did was point towards Don and keep paddling. My conformance instincts told me that I could not be right about the gap since everyone else was so sure that it was somewhere else. Rather than call everyone else back, I decided to turn back and make sure I was right before I blew my whistle. I turned back and found that I was right about the gap. I paddled through into beautiful calm water, landed on the back of the spit, and got out to call back my friends. By this time they were all 400 meters away and too far to hear my whistle over the noise of the surf they were fighting. They were busy working sideways through the noisy surf, never looked back and never noticed that I was not behind them. I took out my radio and tried to contact them but nobody had turned theirs on. There was no need to turn on the radios since we were just going a few hundred meters to a calm lagoon. I waited but they were making good progress and were soon dots on the horizon. I figured that they were going to go the long way around Punta Perla and I didn’t want to get stuck in the lagoon at low tide, so I let the wind blow me across the shallow water and landed on the other side on a spit to wait.
I waited and waited and time seemed to crawl almost to a stop. I called on my radio from time to time but nobody answered. It seemed like we had really messed up by getting separated like this. After a few eternities I thought I saw someone walking far off on the Punta Perla spit on the other side of the lagoon. A little while later John finally called me on the radio. He was walking on the big spit, had seen my yellow kayak and finally decided to turn on his radio. He and Lucy were still convinced that the gap was farther down the spit and John had to verify directions several times. I’d say “the gap is 400 meters BACK the way you came, to your right”. He would reply with a question “Don’t you mean my left as I face you?”. “NO, on your right as you face me”. He said something about Don going off on his own and I feared we were splitting up into smaller groups. After John got off the radio to get back in his boat I decided to paddle back to the gap and stand in it with my paddle up to show the way.
By the time I paddled back across the lagoon against the wind, Don came out the gap towards me. Then I saw paddles appearing above the sand in the middle of the spit and then John and Lucy appeared. Finally we were re-assembled and we paddled across the lagoon. We landed on the spit on the other side near the deeper water of Canal el Infernillo for the break we cut short when we first saw the gap in the spit.
I have been paddling in the north end of the Gulfo de California many times now and rarely in the south. One of the things I hear people talk about are mangrove trees on the edge of the sea. These are common in the south but apparently most of the places I have been in the north Gulfo are too cold for mangroves. I have seen mangrove swamps in Costa Rica, but seeing one in the Gulfo would be a first for me. On our second day on this trip while paddling towards Punta Ast Ah Keem, I found a few mangrove seeds floating in the water. This meant there were mangroves somewhere nearby and I looked forward to seeing them. The lagoon inside Punta Perla had a big grove of them, and the bight behind some of the spits on the Canal el Infernillo sheltered smaller patches of these trees. I found individual trees growing on the edge of sandy beaches. What an amazing sight to see a tree growing in pure salt water! At last I have seen mangroves in the Gulfo de California!
The wind and the tide were both pushing us south and we made good progress down the Canal el Infernillo on the west side of Isla Tiburon. It was tempting to ride these conditions as far as we could, but there were very few places to camp. Most of the beaches were low, exposed to the wind and clogged with desert scrub behind the beach. We found a spit with a large dune to block some of the wind and lots of open sandy area downwind from it. We set up camp there and hunkered down to cook dinner and set up our tents for the night.