El Arco, Gorda Banks and Los Frailes, Baja California Sur, Mexico
I am writing this in the evening of the 29th of March and am having a hard time remembering all the way back to this morning when we left the rolling Pacific Ocean and entered the Sea of Cortez….so much has happened. Before breakfast we watched a spectacular green-flash sunrise, followed some humpback whales and delighted at a group of common dolphins that joined us in leaving the harbor area at Cabo San Lucas.
After breakfast and throughout the day, in incredibly fine weather, the encounters with spectacular wildlife were unending. First came a group of over 1000 common dolphins. As we made our way back and forth among them for about an hour, they rode the bow of the ship or the stern wake or leapt high in the air or just swam around us, surfacing in the clear mirror surface of the water. It was so beautiful and peaceful that we had to remind each other to remember to breathe!
We then moved on eastward around the bottom of the Baja Peninsula and met with many small groups or pairs of humpback whales. Some of these leviathans of the deep were rolling about and slapping their enormous flippers, some were breaching and others just traveling along. In the late morning we followed a male and female that were joined by another male at the same time that we were following a mother and her calf. It was so interesting and engaging to speculate on what they were doing under the water and what their relationships were to each other. It gave us an idea of the complexity of humpback society and an appreciation of how difficult it is to study these beautiful and haunting animals.
After lunch (and perhaps a short siesta), the National Geographic Sea Bird anchored off a prominent granite headland called Los Frailes, the friars’ rocks. Here we were able to explore the underwater world with fins, mask and snorkel or explore the upper world by kayak. The weather remained spectacular and we all had a delightful afternoon in and on the water.
In the later afternoon, as we weighed anchor to sail northward toward our destinations for tomorrow, we spotted a humpback adult with a tiny calf and we followed them until the setting sun turned the mirror-like sea into spectacular tones of orange and blue and red and the whales into haunting silhouettes. At the same time, hundreds of graceful mobula rays (smaller cousins of the giant manta rays) glided by just under the surface with wing tips breaking through the water-mirror and their black bodies sinking into the depths below us.
Now the stars are out on this warm evening in the Gulf of California and we glide over a still sea of reflected stars. This is, indeed, what we came here for—a day to remember for a lifetime.
