While up on the highest point of the island, some kind of falcon flew by and I caught a picture of it. From here the basalt cliffs dropped almost straight down into the water. I got some vertigo-inducing pictures of the water and the cardone cacti growing on the edge of the cliffs. I chose to return to camp by climbing down a steep talus of broken pieces of basalt. From between the rocks I heard the call of what sounded like small birds. I would hear one from my left, then an answering one from my right or elsewhere. Once I even heard one call from the cracks beneath my feet. I bent down to listen and heard another noise: It sounded almost exactly like a small transistor radio left on between stations. There was a long staticy buzzzzz punctuated by clicks. Once I noticed this sound I heard it coming from many places between the jumble of basalt rocks. I oscillated between several theories about that they could be: Birds hiding from predators under the rocks? Lizards? Insects? Transistor radios dropped by the fishermen and lost in the rocks? When I described the buzzzzzz-click sound to Don Fleming down on the beach, he suggested “Rattlesnakes”.
While we were doing our final packing a pod of dolphins showed up and started jumping in the middle of the cove off our beach. Someone suggested naming this “Dolphin Beach” but we had already used that name for a beach near San Francisquito. I launched early and was able to paddle between the dolphins for a few minutes. But they kept moving and pulled ahead of me towards Isla Rasa. During the day a fin whale crossed in front of us and we paddled closer to one of these animals than any other on this trip, within a few hundred yards.
When we looked at the islands lined up in the morning, it was clear that making a side trip to Isla Rasa would take us a little bit out of the way. Someone suggested that it probably was not worth the extra effort to stop there. However, I wanted to thank Enriquetta personally for offering us safe harbor from the bad weather 6 days ago. Besides, we had seen mysterious things going on around Isla Rasa and wanted to find out what was up. When we arrived at Partida the night before, it looked like there was a little cruise ship anchored off Isla Rasa. As we went to bed for the night the ship was lit up brightly. We joked that there was a party going on over there and we were missing it. In the morning it was gone, but from up on the peak I had seen what looked like the same ship motoring down from the Bahia de los Angeles area. By the time we launched, the ship was back and anchored off Isla Rasa again. What could it be? When we got close enough this ship turned out to be the “Sea Bird” from Lindblad Expeditions. I looked them up on the WEB when I got home: http://www.travelwizard.com/linblad-expeditions-cruises/lindblad-ship-mvseabird-lion.html. This boat was full of birders who were being shuttled back and forth to Isla Rasa to view the nesting colonies there. It turns out that the organization that is in charge of the island has decided instead of asking people not to land, they now welcome people to the island to educate them about the birds and their nesting colonies. This is why the naturalist has two student volunteers now: Visitors are required to have someone escort them on the trails of the island to point out eggs in nests, mere dents in the dirt, that are sometimes right on the trail. The birds have little fear of people and will stay on their nests as you step over them. I asked Torr, a student volunteer, if these birds naturally have no fear like animals on the Galapagos Islands. I had noticed that the yellow legged gulls that nest on many beaches will fly away from their eggs if I approach them. But the birds on Isla Rasa, mostly Hermans Gulls, did not. Torr told me that these gulls were normally more skittish but they had become acclimated to naturalists. Besides the largest nesting colony of Hermans Gulls in the world, there was also a recent addition to the island: a colony of terns that had just become established a few years ago. The naturalists and birders were very excited about this.
We asked permission to land over the VHF radio and were granted it. We followed a zodiac full of birders out of the deep green water of the Gulfo de California into the shallow electric blue water of the lagoon. The landing spot inside the lagoon was the only sandy spot on an island of sharp rocks. We met the resident naturalist, Enriquetta, and thanked her and Torr profusely for their offer of a safe harbor on the recent windy day. Another feature of this island was all the cairns of rocks piled up everywhere. Some of the books about Baja refer to these as the “mysterious cairns of Isla Rasa”. Torr destroyed these romantic notions by telling us that the cairns were left behind by guano miners. When Europeans first found this island it was meters deep in bird shit and they scraped it all off to use as fertilizer. When they got near the bottom they piled the rocks up out of the way to get at the last few inches of guano.
As far as the birders were concerned, we appeared out of nowhere. One woman asked me where we cane from and where our boat was. We were apparently the most interesting thing to happen in days and it almost seemed like more pictures were taken of us than of the birds. Don Fleming begged me to talk to the crew from the cruse ship and see if we could get some more drinking water. We had packed enough water for 9 days of paddling plus 25% extra. We had two extra emergency layover days in our float plan and had already used one of them up, so we were going to be out for at least 10 days total. Just that morning Don had insisted that everybody take out their water and do an assessment. The total had come out to be about 3 gallons of water left per person, enough for all three of our remaining days with at least one extra day for an emergency stay. I felt we had enough but Don wanted to be extra safe. So I talked to some of the crew on the island and they contacted people on the boat. I paddled over to the ship and handed them two of our empty waterbags which they filled up with 5 gallons of fresh water. When we finally landed three days later we had 6 or 7 gallons extra to dump on the sand but for days afterwards Don thanked me profusely for getting us the peace of mind of some extra water. After getting fresh water from the ship, I returned to Isla Rasa to do some shopping.
Another job of the student volunteers was to sell T-shirts in front of the Naturalist’s house! The shirts say “Isla Rasa” with a baby tern design on the front and back. I didn’t want to have to carry more clothes around in my kayak for another week, and wondered if these T-shirts were available on the mainland or on the WEB. I asked Torr “Can I buy these shirts anywhere else?” and his answer was “No, this is the only mall on the island”. So we all dug into our drybags to find our “panga money” and spend it buying T-shirts on an island in the middle of nowhere. An island so small that Google has lost it. (La Rasa was accidentally edited out of Google’s satellite maps).
That morning we had expected to have time to paddle past Isla Salsipuedes and camp somewhere on Isla Animas this evening. However, we spent so much time on Isla Rasa that we feared we would be camping late at our next stop. So we aimed directly at Salsipuedes and landed on a beautiful beach on the north side of that island. Normally I am leery of north facing beaches but the weather looked good and it was a very beautiful beach. The weather held and the moon came up over our camp that evening making it even more beautiful.