Baja, LA Bay to Punta El Alacran, April 20th 2000.

Finally we got on the water this morning with no more incidents. We paddled across LA Bay and between two islands where a group of UC Davis researchers recently had a boating accident in rough weather and many of them died. The water was dead calm for us, and we all agreed that we would sit tight on the beach if the wind came up and the sea became rough. As we crossed the bay, a gray whale blew near us! Grays are supposed to be migrating up the Pacific side of the Baja peninsula on their way back to the arctic! So any gray whales we see here are ones that have gotten seriously lost or are looking for alternate feeding grounds. We also saw a small pod of dolphins swimming between our boats. These were quite a bit larger than any other dolphins I have ever seen from a kayak.

When we got to the other side of the bay, we explored all the points and paddled into Puerto Don Juan, a cove that was on our list of calm places to duck into if the weather turned bad. In here we found a large fishing boat wrecked and left to rot. We continued around the point and past Isla El Pescador with keep-off signs on it. We looked around a final corner to a long sandy beach with a resort on it, but decided to turn back and camp on a little private beach on Punta El Alacran.

After we landed, Penny got a sting ray hit on her toe! It stung her near the toenail, so it didn’t penetrate very deep. But some of the venom got into her system and she spent the evening with her foot in a pot of hot water.

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