BY ANNA WEBB
awebb@idahostatesman.com
My first sea kayaking trip began with a cold jolt. I sat high and dry in the kayak then flipped into the sea to prove I could extract myself if the craft capsized in open water.
I was quickly reminded that the state of up-side-down-ness, whether in sea water or in a yoga class, is one best avoided.
I rang in 2012 with a five-day kayaking trip during January in the Mexican Sea of Cortez. We were a group of seven, a mix of family and friends, and one guide.
We circled Espiritu Santo, an island about 20 miles off the coast from the city of La Paz near the tip of the Baja peninsula.
I rowed crew in college. I know about turning, or “feathering” oars, about pulling boats in and out of the water, and about how shore is always farther away than it looks, especially when you’re hungry, night is falling, and there’s cold water sloshing over your hands. But sea kayaking was a complete unknown.
Luckily, my maiden sea kayaking voyage was free of flipping. The Sea of Cortez is known for its tranquility, and it was, save for one day when swells were large enough to hide the kayak beside me as it slipped into the trough between waves.
The rolling swells combined with a breakfast of lardy tortillas caused my first-ever case of sea sickness. Who knew sea sickness was even possible in a kayak?
ONE OF THE WORLD’S PARKS
The 700-mile-long Sea of Cortez separates Baja California from Mexico’s mainland. Jacques Cousteau famously called the sea “the world’s aquarium” because of its marine diversity.
It’s one of 183 UNESCO world heritage natural sites, a designation shared with the Grand Canyon and the Galapagos Islands.
Aside from its famous seas, Baja is notable for its surreal, Dali-esque landscapes.
Dry, rocky hillsides reminiscent of the Boise Foothills slope to turquoise water. Pink granite cliffs, white rock eroded into spires, and arches like immense cathedrals jut up from the coastline.
AN ISLAND IN A SEA OF TRANQUILITY
Espiritu Santo is roughly the size of Manhattan, but that’s where any similarity ends. It became a marine national park in 2008, and is free of human development.
But undeveloped doesn’t mean uninhabited. The island is home to fascinating animals, including a species of cartoonishly cute ring-tailed cats, sea birds, black-tailed jackrabbits that hover just outside the campfire glow, and scorpions.
The scorpions didn’t make an appearance at our camps, despite our nighttime walks in search of them. I have always wanted to see a scorpion that wasn’t sealed in Lucite and made into a paperweight. Even without them, the walks were among the greatest delights of the trip.
Our headlamps lit the dunes, the deep red-rock washes, and the giant cacti that looked like something out of a Sergio Leone western.
We found spiders, and made sure to not crash through the webs they wove across low, naturally bonsai-carved bushes.
Our guide shared a charming peculiarity of vegetation on Espiritu Santo. Sparse rainfall makes trees and bushes grow as dwarf versions of themselves.
I remember a breathtaking moment coming around a bluff. Our headlamps shined into a shallow swamp where a blue heron stood, still as stone, looking back at us.
BACKPACKING BY BOAT
We chose BOA, or Baja Outdoor Activities, to outfit and arrange our trip. Our group included lots of experienced campers, so we opted for a “semi” catered trip.
We set up our own tents, cooked meals together, cleaned up, and repacked our own gear each morning, a task our guide accurately described as “like a game of Tetris.”
We had mostly single kayaks, and one double, propelled by the traditional double-bladed paddles.
A sea kayaking trip is for minimalists. All gear — tent, sleeping bag, gym bag-sized dry bag for clothes and a small dry bag for your camera, or a book — has to fit inside the kayak. So does the communal stuff, such as the camp stove, and a week’s worth of food and tequila. Even a portable toilet the size of a small cooler must be carried in a kayak.
Days of paddling ended at several camp sites on Espiritu Santo, all classic crescents of sand. But each had its particularities: Iridescent shells that shone in the moonlight at one beach, inexplicable piles of spiny blowfish skeletons at another.
One camp on the island’s east side had giant, yellow tablets of stone and red crabs scrambling over the rocks.
MIDNIGHT AT THE OASIS
I consider myself a camping neophyte. As a kid, I was dragged on family camping trips under protest. It’s odd for a native Idahoan, but I never wanted anything to do with the great outdoors. I equate big pines with deep melancholy.
My only pleasant memory of camping was once seeing an empty bottle of Jack Daniels, intact, but melted to the shape of a flip-flop at the edge of a camp fire.
That’s why I was surprised to immediately fall in love with desert camping.
On a past trip to Turkey, I visited a caravanserai, one of the fort-like inns along the Silk Road where merchants took shelter for the night with their camels.
Caravansarais have been a comforting image to me ever since, and camping in the desert felt like bringing them to life.
I loved my tent, The North Face “Fat Frog” model with transparent netting for star gazing.
Nightfall brought that particular joy of zipping myself in. I’d switch on my headlamp and open up the perfect kayaking read: “The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific,” by Paul Theroux.
BLUE WATER, BLUE DAZE
I won’t romanticize the paddling. A day of paddling broken into two- and three-hour chunks can get long, even in blue water along a rose pink shore.
The tedium can lead to all kinds of soul-searching, which may, or may not, be a good thing.
It can also lead to singing to pass the time. You quickly discover which songs in your repertoire best lend themselves to the repetitive task of pulling a paddle through the water.
For me, that involved a flashback to my time in a Slavic chorus. Minor-key, mournful tunes about brave Dalmatian soldiers, forbidden love and artichoke farming, were just about right.
SWIMMING WITH THE LOCALS
Most Baja trips involve a pilgrimage to a rocky outcropping off the coast of Espiritu Santo to swim with the sea lions.
Clad in wetsuits, we jumped into the sea with only one rule in mind: stay at least 9 feet from the rocks because male sea lions can be territorial.
The rocks teemed with dog-faced sea lions squinting at the sun. They slept, they rolled, they nudged each other. They coughed like old-time smokers.
I had that sensation that often comes with travel to surreal landscapes, a kind of hyper-consciousness that lets you stand outside yourself and know you’re experiencing something singular and strange.
I watched two sea lions bobbing past me in profile, indifferent, just an arm’s length away. Then I looked through my mask and saw a scattering of neon-yellow fish, and a sea lion the size of a heavy bag floating just beneath my feet.
Anna Webb: 377-6431
