After lunch Andrea Wolf dawdled with Herb and the rest of us pulled ahead. Doug Hamilton and I hugged the shore and rock gardened all afternoon. We took turns following each other in the shallows between the sharp barnacle covered rocks. There was enough of a swell to make this interesting and keep us wet. I timed one wave badly, washed up onto a rock and was stuck for a minute. Whenever Doug and I hugged the shore and rocks, Kate DesLauriers pulled ahead until near the end of the day we could not see her any more. She waited for us at the last point of the day, Punta Prieta.
The tide was too low to duck over the shortcut behind Punta Prieta so we had to go around. A friendly pescadero, Manuel by name, motored up to talk to us. We asked if he had any fish to sell. He suggested lobster instead but had only piquenta ones, no grande lingusta. When we requested five of them for our whole group he looked disappointed, like he didn’t have that many. He asked if we were camping on the next beach and said he would be back later. I think he went off to catch a few more lobsters!
We landed on a beautiful sandy beach behind the point. Not long after we saw Herb and Andrea round the point. They landed about the same time Manuel returned. He is a stocky man with virtually no neck. He made a point of going around and introducing himself to each of us with a hearty handshake. He sold us nine very small (piquenta) lobsters for 150 pesos (a little over ten dollars US). Since we were taking a layover day, he promised to come back tomorrow afternoon with a Grande Pesdado for our dinner. I offered to help push his panga offshore. He asked me (in Spanish, then sign language) if I was strong, to which I answered SI! Then he made a show of stumbling every time I pushed his boat, as if I was stronger than he expected. Manuel is quite a character. We boiled the lobster as an appetizer before our dinner, dipping them in olive oil instead of butter.