Fortunately, our kayaks made excellent progress across the wind and were not set very much to the south and we went straight to the north tip of Punta Concepcion. Unfortunately, the wind perversely came from the normal north direction again while we wanted to go straight east. This wind had a long distance to fetch up wind waves with whitecaps. Like two days before it was another stretch of paddling with waves coming at us from the side and occasionally spilling over the kayaks.
When we rounded the northern most point the wind was finally blowing our direction for a short while. I hugged the point and tried to get some surfing rides where the waves rose up. Kate DesLauriers followed me for a while until I recommended that she go wide with everyone else.
A little point called Punta El Nido was a hook of land that protected a small beach out of the waves. I tried to entice everyone to land there for a lunch break. But Herb Howe had talked to another kayaker, Joe Petolino, who had camped here years ago. Herb had a GPS co-ordinate for Joe’s campsite that seemed to indicate that the next sandy beach was the one to head for. We headed there but discovered that we could not land. All we could see was the waves from the north breaking over reefs in front of the beach. What we could not see until later was that there was a calm cove behind a rock in front of this beach. We might have been able to duck behind this rock and make a safe landing. Not knowing this we slogged on around Punta Pilares to look at a beach I had seen on maps.google.com that would be protected from the waves.
What Google had not shown us was that this beach was also protected by a rocky reef. Someone who was not used to rock gardening might have turned away and continued on looking for someplace else to land. But I paddled up close and found a deep water gap through the reef. Behind this was a channel that turned back to the beach. Everyone followed me and were pleased to be able to land in dead-calm water when they had been dreading a surf landing all afternoon.
Kate had a water-bag with a cap that apparently slowly leaked away some of her precious fresh drinking water. She might not have noticed this if some local desert honeybees had not swarmed into her cockpit to drink up the spilled water. Apparently these bees do not see fresh (non salty) water very often and this was a great boon to them. They swarmed around the cap of the offending water-bag and showed us where we had to be more careful with our caps next time.