We woke up to really
calm water and a great Baja sunrise.
Brian decided to sleep
in his inflatable yak, actually looks rather comfy!
A pod of dolphins
were not too far from the beach and that really got us scrambling to get the
kayaks in the water. The kayak I was using was a 15 foot Freedom, sit-on-top
(SOT) style that I borrowed from my buddy Sam at work. This was the first
SOT that I had ever used. At first I felt very unstable. Sitting much higher
than the waterline and not having something to lock your knees into took a
while for me to accept. After 10 minutes, I was fine and paddling down the
shoreline to the south. There wasn't any real structure out here, just groups
of pelicans on the beach we'd kayak up to.
Heading south down the
beach, a group of pelicans on the right.
You can get so close
to wildlife in a kayak.
The smooth water looking
back toward camp.
Goodtimes and Cherokee
on the shore and I navaigate the shallow waters back in.
We kayaked maybe a
mile south, then headed back toward the trucks. Cherokee was tied to the Jeep
and she was being a good watchdog for us. We packed up the gear, had some
lunch and headed south toward Gonzaga Bay. The road was pretty rough, but
not more so than I remember. On the washboards I like to push the truck a
little faster, maybe 25-30 mph to smooth things out a little. Probably not
the best thing for the truck, but hey, it's a Toyota, it can handle it. ;-)
Goodtimes' Jeep was having some issues though. His Rubicon is set up for hardcore
rockcrawling trails and the miles of washboard roads were not the best for
it. A bracket holding his front steering stabilizer broke and started rattling.
We'd find more stuff later.
We got to Gonzaga
Bay and thankfully the Pemex was open, so we topped off our tanks. We followed
the runway down to the beach. We drove the beach for a few miles south to
a nice secluded camp spot with a view of Punta Final.
I had to do some creative
scanning and stitching to get this map since our camp was right between two
pages in the almanac!
On
to Day Three...