The crew clears the channel at first light and steer for Puerto Refugio at the north end of Guardian Angel Island, passing Sail Rock and its bright guano pyramid. Guardian Angel lies long and dry to starboard, reputed to hold snakes, iguanas, and gold. Tides run to 14 feet. In Puerto Refugio’s twin basins, the tidal stream is so strong that weighted bottom nets will not hold and instead sieve the flow. After anchoring, they row to a sand and rubble shore strewn with whale vertebrae, fish bones, and large deserted nests. No human debris appears.

Tiny and Sparky step briefly inland and, when they return, they are “subdued and quiet” (185). They work west along boulders into a smooth reef. The falling tide leaves clear pools rich in sponges, corals, small algae, broken-back shrimps, and masked crabs. Sally Lightfoots and Pachygrapsus scuttle on slick rock. Volcanic ledges hold caves packed with bats.

As cold comes on, they finish a heavy take: An echiuroid with spooned proboscis, shrimps, encrusting Porites, several chitons, several octopi, abundant marine pulmonates high on rock, barnacles, stinging worms, juvenile Ophionereis, club and sharp urchins, heart urchins, and caverns lined with white, blue, and purple sponges. Crab nets straining the current bring up Chloeia viridis and hand nets take the pelagic nudibranch Chioraera leonina. Water is cold and the fauna mixes northern and southern elements. Gear includes the skiff, weighted nets, crab nets, and dip nets; the movie camera again misfires. Tiny feels unwell, but emerges later with the assurance that the issue was “simple flatulence” (189).

They round the north tip of Guardian Angel and run down its eastern shore in clear blue water and a long swell. Midday, they pass a belt of large gelatinous drifters that break in the dip nets, then a close whale blows foul spray across the deck. They make speed toward Tiburón with wind and tide, watching high red cliffs through glasses. The sea feels empty of boats and villages; Steinbeck reflects on the Seri people and their reputation as “cannibals” (190). Reports about the Seri frame the approach, with a brief historical note from Clavigero and reflection on the nature and causes of cannibalism. By late afternoon, they anchor in the lee of Red Bluff Point.

The shore offers reef ledges with potholes, stone fingers with sandy slips, a bouldery reach, and a coarse sand beach. In the reef pools, they take hydroids, encrusting corals, colored sponges, small bright algae, many broken-back shrimps, Heliaster, cucumbers, urchins, and abundant giant snails. High in the zone lie Tegula-like snails and few Sally Lightfoots, with Pachygrapsus common. They collect solitary corals and lots of plumularian hydroids. A very long-legged spider crab appears on the stone fingers. Sting rays lie in the sand, two coupled near a slip, and a light harpoon on a fish line brings them up. Sand living cucumbers are common; a furry crab escapes into its burrow. After dark, the deck lights draw a barracuda-like fish that they spear from the rail. Large bats sweep in from shore, one is struck by accident, then the swarm departs at once. The crew discusses vampires, werewolves, and other mythic beasts.

They sail toward Guaymas and take two sierras. The squid jigs are worn out and they repair them with white chicken feathers. Near evening, they pass sport-fishing boats and turn in at Punta Doble to anchor in Puerto San Carlos, a narrow rocky entrance leading to calm water. They go ashore on a bouldery beach and collect familiar forms, including new snails and two echiuroids. The water is warm and thick with shrimps.

After dark, sharp hissing and heavy splashes rise around the Western Flyer. The searchlight shows the bay swarming with small fish and hunting schools of “some kind of great fish” (198). Sparky and Tiny try to net a school with a long seine from the skiff but cannot close it. They return and the crew catches hundreds of tiny fish with hand nets. Sparky fries them whole in olive oil and they eat them hot and crisp. They resume night work at the rail and take shrimps, larval shrimps, small swimming crabs, and transparent ribbonlike fish in the dip-nets.

They sail in the morning for Guaymas, the first town with real communication since San Diego. The Western Flyer runs a short leg and the crew, feeling as though they are drifting through “a parallel realistic world” (200), notes that low tides have become their clock and the engine their second hand. They plan only a few stations beyond Guaymas before the charter ends.

Nearing port, they feel the distance from newspapers, telegrams, and business, and they resent the pull back to them. They recall quiet visits from Gulf Indigenous peoples who sit on the rail and trade in unnamable things rather than money. They note how local people struggle to price time or labor, while in the north even air, heat, and fear are sold. Steinbeck considers how roads and high-tension wires carry the true bridge between cultures.

They run into Guaymas, pass customs, visit the consulate for mail, and handle port errands. The railroad and hotel show that Guaymas now faces outward rather than into the Gulf. Tourist trinkets sit where the shore once joined the town. The crew meets kind people, finishes its business, and prepares to move on “with reluctance” (203).

They leave Guaymas subdued. Sparky and Tiny pine for the town; Tex and Tony are homesick. They anchor by Pájaros Island. At dawn, they visit a Japanese shrimp fleet: Six dredgers working in the area surround a huge mother ship, scraping the seabed clean. Two net dumps reveal mountains of shrimp mixed with tons of dying bycatch: Sierras, rays, sharks, tuna, pompano. These unwanted fish are shoveled back overboard as waste. Aboard, the crew is courteous, yet Steinbeck condemns the operation as “good men doing a bad thing” (206) by being so wasteful. It seems like a crime against nature, with Steinbeck urging limits and study before the fishery collapses. He also notes America’s own record of resource ruin, likening the situation to brilliant artisans producing poor films under corrupt studio heads.

Southbound toward Estero de la Luna, the men try harpooning giant manta rays. Repeated strikes snap increasingly heavier lines. Tex forges a massive arrowhead, but the wind ends the hunt. Night brings eerie humidity and a shared “curious feeling” (209) of an unseen presence. Before dawn, fog swallows the skiff; a menacing hiss mimics the dreaded cordonazo until they touch a sand bar and feel relieved. Inside the estuary, sullen fishermen land huge mullet-like fish. The crew do not feel welcome. Collecting proves meager: Burrowing anemones, Cerianthus, green sand dollars, heart-urchins, multitudes of enteropneust acorn worms, hermits, and a rare brittle-star; many mysterious burrows yield nothing. A “quality of evil” (212) hangs over the island.

Steinbeck meditates on how places shape mood, on ways of listening in argument, and on ideas needing discontent to root. Uneasy, the crew quit the estuary and steer for Agiabampo, their last station. They sail through a shallow, sterile sea, the manta fever gone but now “bloated with stories” (215).

The crew makes a final Gulf stop at Agiabampo, threading sand-bars by leadline and anchoring offshore. In the lagoon, they find dense mangroves, broad sand flats, and their first extensive eelgrass, though it is oddly sparse in fauna. Stingrays are everywhere; grapsoid crabs burrow high in the intertidal, giant conchs and big hermits abound, Chione clams and fierce blue-clawed swimmers are common, and a scale-worm is taken from a Cerianthus-like tube. Tube-worms carpet the sands. Birds such as oystercatchers and waders work the exposed bars. Beating the ebb back to the boat is a slog.

That night, steering for home, they debate the “waste” (217) of the Japanese shrimp fleet. To fishermen, it is a terrible loss. From the biological perspective, however, nothing is wasted. Matter and energy cycle through gulls, worms, cucumbers, and bacteria. From this, thoughts switch to overproduction, historical waves of coordination and collapse, the possible functions of pain and war, and the crucial humility of speculation.

A dense dawn fog brings a comic discovery of an island—actually Espíritu Santo—after Tiny and Sparky drift off-course during the night. In San Gabriel Bay, they strip and collect along the blinding white sands that have paled the fauna: Pale crabs, oddly colored starfish; heads of green-brown coral with Phataria and club urchins; Chione betrayed by tiny veils of green algae; vicious, stinging heart-urchins; hachas thick with commensals; zoanthids; a long synaptid cucumber; a membranous tubeworm whose showy crown snaps to sand-color; rich mangrove roots with hairy grapsoids, a dopey Xanthodius, porcelain crabs, snapping shrimps, barnacles, two new ophiurans, and a large sea-hare.

Reluctantly, they stow gear, cork jars, lash skiffs, and steam south. As they round the Cape, the crew hears “one great clap of thunder” (222) and the gray Pacific heaves into swell.

Pushing past the false cape at 3 AM, the Western Flyer leaves the sun-washed Gulf for a gray, rising Pacific. Seas build; spray sheets the decks; the boat pitches so hard a can of olive oil floods the galley and the coffee pot falls. Birds zigzag landward, hiding in troughs from the wind. At the wheel, the helmsman feels the storm and forces a course through it. With the Gulf hidden astern, the crew struggles to relate its intimate microcosm—to the reefs, tide pools, warm lagoons, the “little animals” (223)—to the macrocosm of the open sea. Out of this dislocation grows a larger synthesis: The trip itself takes on shape and tone, a nucleus from which threads of thought run to many realities. The laws of thought feel contiguous with the laws of things; the experience is musical, clear but hard to communicate.

Below, thousands of jarred specimens slosh in the hold, not as “trophies” (224), but as imperfect sketches of a living picture that truly survives only in memory, recalling the sun-glare, brine, heat, and the mental ferment they provoked. Steinbeck insists this was no solemn “service to science” (224), nor mere discovery and naming, but something that the crew simply loved: Sea gardens, beer and labor, fused into a single whole of which they felt a part. Driving toward Cedros Island, the wind rips the whitecaps, rivers of water sluice the scuppers, and the bow-to-mast guy wire thrums like the lowest pipe of a giant organ.