Sierra de la Giganta & The Sea
We met a beautiful morning, in all its glory. Colors danced in the sky as we made our way further south. All night long we had travelled in this direction, and pretty soon we were rewarded with a big marine mammal: a blue whale. Gigantic on all accounts, the largest living being ever to live on this planet. We followed it for a while and later, after enjoying the lovely views of the Sierra de la Giganta, that mountain range coursing the southern half of the peninsula down to the Bay of La Paz, we encountered a large group of common dolphins, not really interested in our ship!
As the day wore on, we encountered another denizen of the oceans, a fin whale, just a little bit smaller than the giant blue whale. But this individual wasn’t really interested in us either, and showed us very little of its enormous body. After a while we abandoned it to its own program…
Later in the day we were rewarded with a biological view reserved for few: a gigantic bait ball pursued by some bigger underwater predators. Incredible numbers of sardines, probably, made it to the surface and jumped out of the water. With these huge numbers, we could hear the water being broken by the animals, like a monstrous sizzling. They would stop or disappear, then do it again, in a slightly different position. We photographed till our fingers hurt, and then slowly proceeded on our way south. It is quite a remarkable phenomenon, as all the naturalists were heard to say they had never seen this happen before.
The next marine mammals we saw were a good number of pilot whales, again on their own business, completely ignoring us! We watched them for a good while, and by that time had arrived to our afternoon destination: Isla San Francisco, where we kayaked and hiked and snorkeled, to our heart’s content. Later that night, we returned to the beach and gazed at the clear starry sky for a while, with interesting explanations by Naturalist Linda Burback.
