Isla Espiritu Santo, Baja California Sur
A westerly wind in the Gulf of California? Unusual and unfortunate, but we are flexible.
Find a bay in which we have never been before; a wave-created shoreline of boulders, hiding a salt lagoon of deep blue in the centre merging to rust-red along the edges. A red alga! One that thrives in high saline concentrations.
Fiddler crabs threatening our toes with their inch-long claw.
Least sandpipers probing the salt-mud edge, stitching like tiny sewing machines, soon to migrate back to boreal and Arctic wetlands.
Casual walks through armed desert vegetation. Lizards scurrying into spiny hideouts. Impenetrable nests of desert rats stuffed tightly into the most wicked of the wicked vegetation…snakes and ring-tailed cats beware!
A jackrabbit! Big ears, scurrying up the slope! A black one at that! The endemic black jackrabbit of Espiritu Santo! Island isolation, genetic mutations and natural selection lead to speciation. Ask Darwin.
Snorkelers in crystal water enjoying the colours and ballet of myriad fishes. Rapid roosterfish charge after schooling machetes; a froth forms on the surface. A magnificent frigatebird plunges from high to clamp its 5-inch, hooked beak onto these “flying” fish; but another frigatebird swoops in to kleptoparasitize; the trophy falls to the water, lost by greedy birds!
Wetsuits into the water again, this time with lithe sea lions circling curious, our masked and flippered bodies inept in comparison. We watch from below then from above the surface, amid barking bulls and playful yearlings, some sunning, some tragically entangled.
All of this on a day after a dazzling light display late into the previous evening. We were glued to the bow rail for an hour or more, transfixed! Thousands of fish feeding at the surface, zooplankton and smaller fish their target. A nocturnal migration to the upper levels attracts much ocean life. Then the pinnacle! A dozen or more bottlenose dolphins find our bow wave. They glow as if decorated in white neon. Bioluminescence! The instantaneous chemical light produced by dozens of tiny marine organisms when disturbed by moving fish. Or dolphins. Or whales. Or our ship. And even by our hands as they dangle off the night Zodiacs.
A week of miracles comes to a breathless end.
A westerly wind in the Gulf of California? Unusual and unfortunate, but we are flexible.
Find a bay in which we have never been before; a wave-created shoreline of boulders, hiding a salt lagoon of deep blue in the centre merging to rust-red along the edges. A red alga! One that thrives in high saline concentrations.
Fiddler crabs threatening our toes with their inch-long claw.
Least sandpipers probing the salt-mud edge, stitching like tiny sewing machines, soon to migrate back to boreal and Arctic wetlands.
Casual walks through armed desert vegetation. Lizards scurrying into spiny hideouts. Impenetrable nests of desert rats stuffed tightly into the most wicked of the wicked vegetation…snakes and ring-tailed cats beware!
A jackrabbit! Big ears, scurrying up the slope! A black one at that! The endemic black jackrabbit of Espiritu Santo! Island isolation, genetic mutations and natural selection lead to speciation. Ask Darwin.
Snorkelers in crystal water enjoying the colours and ballet of myriad fishes. Rapid roosterfish charge after schooling machetes; a froth forms on the surface. A magnificent frigatebird plunges from high to clamp its 5-inch, hooked beak onto these “flying” fish; but another frigatebird swoops in to kleptoparasitize; the trophy falls to the water, lost by greedy birds!
Wetsuits into the water again, this time with lithe sea lions circling curious, our masked and flippered bodies inept in comparison. We watch from below then from above the surface, amid barking bulls and playful yearlings, some sunning, some tragically entangled.
All of this on a day after a dazzling light display late into the previous evening. We were glued to the bow rail for an hour or more, transfixed! Thousands of fish feeding at the surface, zooplankton and smaller fish their target. A nocturnal migration to the upper levels attracts much ocean life. Then the pinnacle! A dozen or more bottlenose dolphins find our bow wave. They glow as if decorated in white neon. Bioluminescence! The instantaneous chemical light produced by dozens of tiny marine organisms when disturbed by moving fish. Or dolphins. Or whales. Or our ship. And even by our hands as they dangle off the night Zodiacs.
A week of miracles comes to a breathless end.
