Isla Santa Catalina is a 14 mile crossing from Isla Monserrat. So it would be possible to cross over and back in one day. But disliking crossings as I do, I wanted to do some exploring while I was there. This island is 8 miles long and I wanted to circumnavigate it. So I planned to cross over in the morning, go half way or more around the island, camp one night and cross back over the next day. I took a tarp, sleeping bag, two days worth of food and left most of my gear behind.
I launched early in the morning when the air and the water was calm. The sun came up over Isla Santa Catalina as I started paddling towards it. Most of the crossing was uneventful. I expected the wind to come up in the afternoon but it came up from the north for the last hour of a four and a half hour crossing. During that last hour there were pretty interesting waves from the north. After I landed I climbed up a bluff and saw that what I thought were wind waves were actually the waves in a tide rip off the west side of the island.
I didn’t climb up the bluff to look at the waves, I did this to get my VHF radio as high as possible and try to contact everyone else back on Isla Monserrat. Herb Howe didn’t believe that the VHF radios would reach over 5 miles, but with my extra altitude they worked great at 14 miles. I even contacted Doug who was down exploring the south end of Monserrat. I told Herb my plan: Paddle south with the wind to the end of Catalina and hope for calmer air on the other side of the island. I would not be able to contact them again from there.
I quickly paddled down the west side of Isla Santa Catalina. The most interesting shoreline I saw was near the south tip where there were many little coves, points, rocks and an arch that looked like the head and trunk of an elephant. Sitting off the tip of the island was a Mexican Navy cutter, probably looking for drug runners. Around the bottom and starting up the east side the wind did calm down a bit and I made good progress. The Navy cutter passed me going north in the middle of the afternoon.
Late in the day I started looking for a good place to camp. But the sky was clear and the sun shining so I kept going. At 5:00 pm I stopped for a break on a huge gravel berm. The sun was just starting to cast shadows on me from the peaks of the island. I was not particularly tired so I decided to continue around the north tip of the island before camping. On the other side of the island I would still have a few more hours of sunlight for taking pictures.
The north tip of Isla Santa Catalina was a beautiful rock garden. I had feared the wind from the north would fetch up waves and make this a difficult area. However, I was pleased to find the water calm enough to go behind the rocks and enjoy myself. Standing on one of these rocks was a fisherman. We had seen the panga fishermen do this: They drop men off on different rocks in the morning. They stay there all day with a hand line and fill up a 5 gallon bucket with fish. Then before the tide comes back up over the rock the panga returns and picks them up.
Starting down the west shore of the island I promised myself I would camp at the first good beach I found. I stopped on several gravel beaches but didn’t like them. The gravel sloped too steeply or they were covered in trash from panga fishermen. I might have stayed in one of these fish camps, but there were blankets and jackets lying about as if they planned on returning in the evening. The fisherman I had seen standing on a rock had been picked up and the panga followed me down the coast. They figured out that I was looking for a place to camp and came over to talk to me. Manuel knew almost as much English as I know Spanish, meaning practically none. But between us we found enough words for Manuel to communicate that the next beach I was looking at was a bad one and I should follow them to their camp.
Their camp was in a cove in the island and was someplace I would have considered if it had been unoccupied. I was invited to dinner, which was chicken and bean tacos. I ate their food and drank their tang-flavored water. It didn’t seem polite to refuse because I feared I’d get sick from eating with them. And I never did. I shared bags of trail mix with them for dessert from my lunch supplies. For one of our shared meals on Isla Carmen I had made tacos for my friends. I have a secret ingredient that I use when I cook Mexican food: Mayonnaise. Why mayonnaise? Trying to reverse engineer some secret sauces at Mexican restaurants I’m pretty sure this is a common ingrediant. I brought a squeeze bottle of this, referred to it as “secret sauce” and offered it to my kayaking buddies to put on their tacos. They refused, citing that it was not very authentic. So I was overjoyed to discover that the panga fishermen on Isla Santa Catalina brought a bottle of mayonnaise to put on their tacos! Talk about real authentic Mexican cooking!
When you ask any panga fisherman about camping on any island in the Sea of Cortez they say the same thing: “Oh No! That is an island of death! If you sleep there you will die!” When pressed for details they will warn you that the island in question is crawling with snakes. My hosts had this bad. Two of them slept in tents. One guy set his sleeping bag up on top of an old refrigerator. Manuel insisted that I sleep on an old rusty iron cot. I think he was offering me the best they had, his own sleeping cot. Then he slept on a sheet of plywood on top of three fish packing crates.
Among many of the environmental disasters that these panga fishermen engage in, they kill snakes everywhere they go. I cringe to think that many of these islands have rare species of snakes that live here and no-where else in the world. I had heard about an island in the Sea of Cortez that had a rattlesnake that didn’t rattle, but I didn’t take it seriously. I assumed that the panga fishermen only killed the snakes they could find and the ones that rattle brought attention to themselves. These fishermen were engaging in an evolutionary experiment to breed quiet rattlesnakes by killing the noisy ones. I met a rattlesnake on Isla Angel de la Guarda that didn’t rattle even when we pulled it out into the sunlight to photograph it. The snake I had seen north of Loreto just last year did not shake its rattle at me. But Andrea Wolfe read a chapter to me from her guidebook about rattle-less rattlesnakes. This species was discovered in the 1950’s. They shake their tails like other rattlesnakes but they have no rattles so there is no sound. And these snakes live only on Isla Santa Catalina, the island I was sleeping on without a tent.
One way to recognize a panga fish camp is by the trash. I watched my hosts throwing trash and food on the ground. Then later in the evening I watched mice running around the beach. The light went on in my head! The panga fishermen leave trash and the rodent population explodes to take advantage of the bounty. Then the predator population increases to take advantage of the excess prey. So the panga fishermen are actually correct! Any island that THEY regularly camp on does end up crawling with snakes! But they bring it on themselves.