The Log From The Sea of Cortez

The crew reaches Puerto Escondido at noon and anchors behind Piedra de la Marina rather than risk the narrow inner entrance. The air is hot and heavy with mangrove flowers. Fishing lines bring in hammerhead sharks and a red snapper. The outer cove serves as a warm, shallow collecting station with mud bottom and small clean boulders. They find large synaptid holothurians identified as Euapta, bright green gars that evade dip nets, botete in numbers, Cerianthus anemones, and two new starfishes. They handle synaptids with submerged wooden buckets, try Epsom salts and oxygen to relax them, and struggle with evisceration. Tiny sights a giant manta in very shallow water and resolves to take one. A canoe arrives with shellfish for sale, including large fixed scallops called abalon, hacha clams, pearl oysters, and conchs.

Visitors arrive by motor launch from Loreto: Rancher Leopoldo Pérpuly, schoolteacher Gilbert Baldibia, and customs officer Manuel Madinabeitia. They invite the crew to join them on a hunt for borrego in the stone mountains. At the ranch, the group sees brackish wells worked by mules, tomato beds, and grapevines. They ride mules and one small horse past xerophytic scrub, dye lichens, and a poisonous shrub.