The forecast was good for today and we had a nice early start. Walking down to the beach with our gear we saw Chaly talking to somebody and when we caught up to him he asked us if we could see the shark. Sure enough, there was something like a fin fifty meters off shore. Chaly said that he had already been out in the red canoe for a look.
It took half an hour for our boats to get freed up and down to the shore but we set off in what we guessed was the right direction, and it wasn’t long before I saw fins circling. The biggest fin seemed disappointingly rounded, but there were plenty of them. They seemed to be moving in opposite directions but I realized that there was only one fish circling, just a very long one. Alex had joined me by now and the shark, keeping some distance, swam in an arc across our bows and then headed back as to strike Alex amidships. I was starting to get a little concerned, and probably she was too. There was nothing threatening about the creature’s manner, but its length seemed to become more and more significant as the distance diminished. Nearing, it turned slightly to pass behind Alex’s kayak; light-colored spots and considerable width gave away its identity. We knew that it was a whale shark, an example of the world’s largest fish, and someone we had long wanted to meet.
We kept up for a while, admiring the scale of the creature’s grace, trying to stay out of the way without losing sight. Another kayak launched meanwhile, paused to say hello, and then went in for a closer look. We let the pair monopolize our new friend’s company until it remembered a prior engagement and headed back to deeper water.
But by then we had made another discovery. With everyone distracted, another set of smaller fins overtook Alex on her starboard side and turned in front of her. This one had wings! Just four feet wide by my guess, this was a devil ray, from both its expression and its feeding habits, not unlike those of the whale shark. We imagined it to be a manta ray, but they are mostly ocean-going and are much larger except when very young. Thurston’s, or bentfin devil ray is another guess. They breed in the Sea of Cortez in the spring.
Our day was complete, but we had just arrived. We thought we should pick a direction so we headed toward Loreto. We still have Isla Coronados in our sights and have been looking for stopping places along the way. As we passed the disused boat ramp a pair of the local security guards motioned us in to warn us of the shark danger, but we we able to tell them that we had seen the chracters in question and that they were not dangerous. While conversing with them there (taking slightly longer in Spanish) we noticed a dark colored heron standing calmly off to the left, with yellow around its eye but not readiily identifiable with my field guide.
We paddled up to our favorite palapas south of the airport. Our kayaks are now always equipped with camp stools, so we sat in the shade for quite a while and drank canned fruit juice. We thought that we would wait for it to laten up a bit so that we could tell for sure what it would be like to paddle in the heat of the day. By the time we got back into our boats again a breeze from the east had made itself felt. And thus begins the rest of the story of our day.