Charles Harris planned on staying in camp and going hiking while Gregg Berman and I circumnavigated the island. We started south in our light, responsive, empty kayaks and soon passed the house that supports all the aquaculture work here. Three guys in a skiff motored over to say hola. We had difficulty understanding each other but I pointed to their nets and asked “pescado?” and they said “Si, blue fin, tuna”. Gregg rolled his kayak for them and they cheered!
Gregg and I continued down the east shore of Isla Todos Santos and found one large cave with two entrances to go through. I went in one entrance and Gregg the other. Through a crack in the wall I could see the bright yellow of his kayak. I backed out but Gregg banged and scraped his way deeper and found a way to come out my entrance.
Around the south end of the island, rough waves stared coming through the gaps. The west shore was being pounded by wind waves from a 20-knot wind from the northwest. We slowly made progress against the wind and I stayed a respectful distance from shore. Gregg went over wash-overs and tried to surf reflected waves close to the cliffs. We turned into the channel between the two islands to do a “figure 8” around both of them. This island is written up in the cruising and surfing guides as a place with large surf all year round and this channel is one of the places mentioned. We found a calm channel to go through on our first pass.
As we stared up the east side of the north island we plowed into the teeth of the wind and waves. Around the north tip of the island the waves grew to eight foot faces occasionally spilling on us. The wind and waves seemed to continuously turn into our faces as we rounded the island making me wonder if we were actually making any progress. Fortunately there are two lighthouses, an old abandoned one and a new one. The parallax relationship of the two towers changed as we paddled and convinced me that I was indeed still moving forward. At the northwest corner of the island there is a reef mentioned in the guides that we had to paddle way out and around, we could see the waves breaking waves there.
Finally we made the turn and headed down the west side. We caught a few rides on the wind waves and went a lot faster than the trip up. At the channel between the two islands I made a wide turn around the surf spot but Gregg tried it out and reported some good rides. He went back for just one more ride a few times before we started around the top of the south island. We surfed through some gaps in the rocks and came back into the calm and wind sheltered cove where our camp was. Having now seen all of both islands we reported that this camp was the best spot on either island.
We discovered that Gregg’s new girlfriend, the recovering pelican, was gone. She flew off while Charles was away so he could not tell us if she looked a lot better. Gregg says “She left us as mysteriously as she arrived”.
Charles had spent the morning reading and had not done a lot of hiking yet. So there was time for the two of us to go for a hike and try to find a path to the very top of the island. We climbed up one lesser peak and then found easy routes across the saddles from one peak to another until we made it to the top. There the wind was so strong it inflated my clothes and made me look very fat! We tried to climb directly down the east side and discovered vertical drops and rough slopes. So we reversed our route from saddle to saddle and made it back to camp in time for dinner.