By then Charles Harris and Gregg Berman were up and we cooked a group breakfast. The last egg, last onion, last potato. Instant black beans, red sauce, bacon and cabbage leaves on tortillas made good breakfast burritos.
The harbor seals came back to their end of the lagoon and hauled out in time for two panga fishermen to walk by and scare them off again. The elephant seals just growled back at the pescaderos and refused to budge off the beach. I started going for a walk and discovered a catch basin full of brown water. It had several buckets in it and a passing fisherman indicated that this was fresh “agua”, their local water supply. While I was gone the fishermen gave us three large lobsters! Charles put them in a mesh bag in the lagoon to keep them live until dinner time.
The island looks like it is covered in brush that will make hiking very difficult. But it turns out most of what looks like plants is actually volcanic rocks covered in shaggy lichen. You can just walk easily over the top of it. So I continued my hike up a ridge and eventually made it to the smaller of two peaks on the island. From there I could see a network of trails which I used to hike across and up the largest peak on the side of the crater of this volcanic island. At one time there used to be a light tower up here but it was a collapsed pile of rust now. The views back down to the lagoon and San Quintin were spectacular. I had hoped for views north the way we had come but that direction was socked in by low clouds. A strong wind was blowing from the northwest making my clothes flap on me like a flag. I followed the trails back down off the peak and they lead me to the elephant seal end of the lagoon.
Around noon Gregg and I went on a short paddle around the island. Once out of the lagoon we felt the full force of the wind and headed into it. This would have been OK but there are extensive kelp beds on the south and west sides of Isla San Martin. It was hard to get effective paddle strokes with the blades bouncing off or clinging to the seaweed. After a while I complained to Gregg that this kelp was pissing me off. He pointed out that it was probably keeping some of this stuff from breaking. He was right; I could see whitecaps outside the kelp bed on the west side of the island but none between there and the shore. We were surrounded by steep hills of dark aquamarine water peaking out behind a frosting of yellow/brown kelp.
Around the north end of the island the kelp thinned out and we started traveling with the wind. We drifted into the cove where the panga fishermen had their camp and they gave us a cheer! Did they know we just paddled around the island? As a treat for our watching fans, we surfed over the low spot in the breaker as we left their cove.
Around the southwest corner of Isla San Martin we found the strongest wind again, right where we started the circumnavigation. I went offshore to swing past some fishermen in a panga. The wind was even stronger here a few yards farther from shore and I had to work hard to get back to the mouth of our lagoon.
After a snack and a drink I went on another hike. All the reports I have heard or read about this island talk about the Lava Tubes. The cruising guide Charles brought has a map with “rough trails” leading to a large area that is supposed to have these caves. I was determined to find them, figure out the easiest path to them and bring my companions back to see them. I never found any trails indicated on the map and spent several hours scrambling over the area marked for lava tubes. I found lots of collapsed lava shelves, some very small caves and lots of tortured lava landscape. To a geologist this might be very interesting. But when someone says “lava tubes” I expect to find big holes in the ground that I can stand up in and hike into for half a mile. I never found anything like that. I returned to camp in time for a wonderful lobster dinner, courtesy of the panga fishermen, and retired to my tent for our last night camping out on this trip.