Punta El Lion to La Paz, April 20th 2009.

In the vein of using up the excess food, we cooked the last five eggs in an omelet for breakfast. I get these eggs from my friend Brandt Dirkee who raises chickens in his back yard. I have heard that eggs which have never been refrigerated last longer because the cold messes up their immune system. So every time I am about to leave on a trip to Baja I call up Brandt and make a request. He tells me that he will talk to “The Girls” and see if their egg production is up to the task. I started with a dozen of these eggs and after two weeks in the desert they were all still good. I keep the eggs in the kayak during the day where the contact with the water keeps them cool. In camp I take the eggs out and put them in a damp nylon bag with all my vegetables and fruit. If possible I put the bag in a cave or in the shade of a rock. This system has worked well for me.

We launched a little earlier than usual and paddled along the long spit. I saw a badger hanging out at the edge of the water at one point. We saw a pod of dolphins at another time. We passed a failed development in the middle of nowhere. The developers had put in concrete power poles in a grid in the middle of the sand dunes. How do people convince themselves to invest in these schemes? There is no source to power up the lines on these poles, never was and probably never will be. The concrete used to make the poles is crumbling away and exposing the RE-bar inside. The concrete was probably made with salt water. Speaking of water, besides power there is no source of drinking water for the prospective property owners. Most of the lines between the poles have fallen down, but the ones that were still up were lined with frigate birds.

I kept seeing a little point ahead of me and expected to come around it any minute now. But it kept retreating from me and eventually I realized I was looking at the very end of the spit miles and miles ahead of me. The wreck of a yacht slowly approached and gave us something to focus our eyes on for half the day. We stopped near it for lunch. In the afternoon we continued to hug the shore to look at some huge condominiums at the very end of the spit. Some of these were built and then damaged in a hurricane years ago and never inhabited. Then a different set of foolish developers started building some newer ones. We heard that construction was stopped after the recent economic downturn in the USA meant that the customer base (gringos) was probably gone. As we paddled past we heard some sounds of work continuing in these huge structures. Along the beach there was a small development of new looking single-family houses and some of them looked lived in.

Then we turned and headed straight across from the end of the spit towards the north end of La Paz. This was only a two mile crossing and soon we made it to the condominium where Andrea Wolf has an apartment. Kate DesLauriers was waiting for us on the beach. The trip to La Paz was over.