AN OPEN-BOAT ADVENTURE — B
PHOTOS / SCOTT SADIL reathe deeply, I tell myself. Stay the margins of surf breaking over the calm. Madrina, my little double-ended boca sandbars, juvenile males, sleek as beach yawl, wallows uncertainly through shadowy seals, glide gracefully within a confusion of ocean swells and contenthe swells, only to erupt through the tious tidal currents, a messy channel surface in exuberant displays of playfunneling through the Santo Domingo fulness or frustration — it's hard to tell boca, a gap in the slender barrier iswhich. Early in the season, well before lands that define the northern reaches calving begins, pairs of Magdalena Bay. of whales engage in Whales breach and bellow all about me. I don't want to do anything to striking postures of intimacy, spiraling The sensation is not make these whales nervous, through the water unlike gazing across a geyser basin, with any more than I would want as if tangled feathers carried by a breeze. steam vents and hot to disturb a herd of elk. The younger males, springs and gaspmeanwhile, pair up ing fumaroles castto joust and spar, ing clouds of fading hurtling themselves at one another like mist across the roiled surface of the middle-school teenagers. Other whales, running tide. full-size and not, surface, spout, sigh, Only these are big, wild animals. My drifting languidly past the tail end of attention to mood has less to do with breakers erased by green water expelled keeping my wits about me in a tangled from the bay. sea than it does with how my emotional I'm alone again when the wind stirs, energy, or state of mind, might affect a gentle nudge from the northwest that the whales themselves. (Because I'm awakens Madrina's mainsail and dainty from California and still live on the West mizzen. We're off, casting about for more Coast, it would be reasonable for me to whales, measuring our retreat should refer to this psychic buzz as vibe.) By the wind raise a fuss. Winter, a scrim any account, I don't want to make these of marginless gray clouds covers the whales nervous, any more than I would sky; I'm relieved, at least, of the need to want to stand within a herd of elk and do keep one eye toward the south, where something to disturb them — especially summer and early-fall hurricanes spin elk that happened to be the size of school north and west off the Mexican mainbuses. land and threaten, occasionally, the tip Some of them are smaller; along of the Baja peninsula. Whale-watching The author, somewhere in Magdalena Bay.
weather in and around Mag Bay means fleece, shells, wool caps, neck gaiters — the stuff of temperate-water sailors everywhere while often overlooked by even experienced hands who picture themselves basking in blue water they remember from Cabo San Lucas or, farther north, in the Sea of Cortez.
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here are easier ways, of course, than tootling around in a small open sailboat to watch whales in and about Mag Bay. Most visitors enjoy the ready access afforded by commercial pangas leaving the docks all winter from both Puerto Adolfo López Mateos and Puerto San Carlos. Ocean sailors will find whales gathered in Bahía Santa María, a popular anchorage south of Cabo Lázaro on the Pacific side of Isla Magdalena, and inside La Entrada, the deep-water entrance to Mag Bay between Isla Magdalena and Isla Santa Margarita. And for comfort and a sense of rustic adventure, there's little that beats the seasonal tent camps, set up at strategic viewing points, that give guests the chance to see whales at dawn and dusk, the quiet low-light hours that offer a more intimate experience with whales and a wealth of other Page 68 •
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• November, 2018