Port Lopez Mateos, 2/25/2022, National Geographic Venture
Aboard the
National Geographic Venture
Baja California
This morning, National Geographic Venture docked at the interesting port, San Carlos. From the 1940s to the 1990s, the port was used for loading agricultural products and fertilizers from the nearby Santo Domingo Valley. Nowadays, San Carlos is basically a place for loading sardines from a local cannery. It is also an important tourist base for whale-watching, principally mating gray whales. At the port, all guests and staff boarded buses to Lopez Mateos, a town located near the northernmost tip of Magdalena Island. The buses traveled across Magdalena Plain, a section of the Sonoran Desert that receives a lot of moisture in the form of dense fog from the Pacific Ocean. Lichens and orchillas, a type of flowering plant, give the desert a phantasmagoric appearance. Guests and staff enjoyed spotting numerous birds, including crested caracaras and kestrels. Once in Lopez Mateos, we boarded local pangas for whale-watching.
During two rounds of whale-watching, we encountered several whales close to our pangas. However, most of the whales were preoccupied with traveling, searching for mates, or just finishing their time of reproduction and thus exiting the lagoon. In reality, the whales were not interested in interacting with the boats and their excited cargo, but we had many opportunities to observe the behavior of these magnificent animals. In town, we all delighted in a delicious fish lunch, ‘pescado zarandeado.’ We enjoyed exploring the local dock with its many colorful shops and crafts, and we admired the wonderful sculpture of a cow-calf pair of gray whales.
Adrian studied biology at the national Autonomous University of Mexico. In 1991 the Wildlife Preservation Trust of Jersey, on Britain's Channel Islands, awarded Adrian with a scholarship to its prestigious 16-week training program in Captive Manageme...
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Beautiful Almejas Bay was the stage for our whale watching performance today. We moved on fiberglass outboard boats called pangas with local pilots. As we reached the mating area, some 60 whales were seen doing amazing things, like spyhopping, breaching, rolling, fluking, and more. We stayed with the whales the whole morning, and, of course, guests and staff took thousands of photos of these gentle giants. We finished this phenomenal day with relaxing walks on the dunes of Magdalena Island in a location known as Sand Dollar Beach.
The day began with a lovely stretch class led by our wellness specialist as the sun rose over Bahia Magdalena. National Geographic Venture made its way into Puerto San Carlos, and we watched pelicans swoop and dive near the shore. After a hearty breakfast, we loaded into buses and made our way to Puerto Adolfo Lopez Mateos. The plaza at the docks is always a festive, colorful place, and we were greeted by Mexican music and traditional dancers. One couldn’t help but dance. Excited, we loaded into the pangas of local, certified whale watching guides and set out toward the mouth of Boca de Soledad. On our way, we slowly passed by the mangroves that play such an important role in the immense amount of life found within Bahia Magdalena. Magnificent frigatebirds roosted in the upper branches while double-crested cormorants were seen diving and fishing in the shadows of the trees. We headed out farther into the bay and began to see blows. Several adult gray whales and a few cow/calf pairs dove and logged and blew and swam in the vicinity of our pangas for the rest of the morning…some off in the distance and some close enough to cover our glasses with spray. It was such a special experience to be in this part of the bay where so many pregnant whales come to give birth. All that whale watching caused us to work up an appetite. We went to a restaurant for a delicious, authentic Mexican meal while Los Coyotes, a musical group, serenaded us with traditional tunes. Full and happy, we returned to the plaza to ready ourselves for our afternoon whale watching tours. It’s amazing how much difference just a few hours can make while observing nature. On this trip, we saw less whales, but those we saw came much closer to the boats. The trip ended perfectly with around ten bottlenose dolphins playing across the bow. We returned to National Geographic Venture with great stories and great recaps from our staff to remind us of all the beauty we witnessed that day.
Last night, we rounded the cape that forms the southern tip of the Baja California Peninsula and began making our way north through the open waters of the Pacific towards Magdalena Bay. The norteño winds were blowing, and the sea conditions were quite different from the flat, glassy waters we experienced earlier in the week. After breakfast, as National Geographic Venture advanced over the swells, a masked booby flew alongside us for several minutes, affording us excellent views of this beautiful seabird. Over a third of our guests this week are part of a group organized by The Nature Conservancy (TNC), and this morning we enjoyed talks from two TNC guest presenters. Tom Dempsey’s talk, “Building Ocean Conservation Solutions for Scale,” focused on actions his team is taking to reduce two different types of adverse human impacts on whales – entanglements in fishing gear and ship strikes. TNC has partnered with fishing communities along the California Coast to create a robust recovery system for lost crab fishing gear, the loose vertical lines of which are one of the more common entanglement threats to whales. Containerships striking whales are often an invisible cause of whale mortality, and Tom also described his team’s vision to bring a “whale safe shipping” certification to the international container shipping industry. Having such a standard would recognize compliance with ship routes and speed restrictions and would allow merchandisers to apply market pressure to reward good behavior. Soon after Tom finished fielding questions from guests, the expedition leader made an exciting announcement over the ship’s public address system: a killer whale had been sighted near the ship! National Geographic Venture slowed down and turned around to allow guests to come out to the bow to enjoy this sighting. The very tall, angular dorsal fin was indicative of an adult male killer whale, and it stayed near us for some time. Our position at the time was just offshore of the southern tip of Isla Margarita, near the Rehusa Channel, which forms the southernmost entrance to Magdalena Bay. Although gray whale calves and their highly protective mothers are inside the shallow waters of the bay, killer whales very rarely enter Baja California’s gray whale lagoons. Although we don’t fully understand why, our naturalists shared theories of why this might be. Once we got underway again, TNC’s Frank Hurd shared a great talk titled, “Sustainability through Partnership – Working with Fishing Communities to Ensure a Better Future for Marine Ecosystems & Everyone that Depends on Them.” Frank has worked closely with local fishing communities here in Baja California Sur and has helped them use scientific tools to create size limit restrictions that can protect their marine resources and future livelihoods. As we witnessed yesterday in Cabo Pulmo, the key elements to efforts like this being successful are initiation and ownership of regulations from within the community. TNC and its partners are working in many other geographies around the world to scale this community-driven, relationship-based approach to marine conservation. Over lunch in the dining room, we breathed a sigh of relief as National Geographic Venture passed through La Entrada, the principal opening of Magdalena Bay to the Pacific. The seas calmed as we entered protected waters and saw our first gray whales of the trip. We enjoyed a presentation from naturalist Rich Kirchner on the “Birds of Baja” before anchoring just offshore of one of the narrowest parts of Isla Magdalena. Excited to stretch our legs and explore this new environment, we loaded Zodiacs to shuttle guests to the beach. In front of us, a sweeping expanse of barchan dunes formed an isthmus connecting Isla Magdalena’s rugged mountains of metamorphic rock to our south and north. These rocks are exotic terranes, accreted onto the edge of the continental plate millions of years ago. Ocean currents then deposited huge quantities of sand in this area, and these rocky outcrops were connected by dunes to form the barrier islands that separate Magdalena Bay from the open Pacific. We broke into smaller, naturalist-led groups to explore this spectacular landscape of shifting sands. We saw shell middens left behind by inhabitants of this area thousands of years ago, fine grains of powdery sand blowing and cascading over the crescent-shaped dunes, succulents that are slowly managing to stabilize their dynamic environment, tracks of kangaroo rats, lizards, foxes, and coyotes, interesting plants such as satiny locoweed and Magdalena twinevine, and a loggerhead shrike perched atop an island of desert thorn. We crested the dunes and took in the sweeping views of Sand Dollar Beach and the waves of the open Pacific with all our senses. Now it was time to beachcomb! In addition to hundreds of sand dollar skeletons – and a few sand dollars that were still alive – we found an abundance of sea turtle ribs, crabs, bird skeletons, and shells left behind by mollusks such as cockles, scallops, and pen oysters…and much, much more. Exhilarated by the beauty of this special place and the joy of exploration, we eventually walked back across the dunes towards National Geographic Venture , glowing in the soft light of the late afternoon sun. After cocktail hour and evening recap, the hotel team treated us to a Mexican fiesta in the dining room. We enjoyed ceviche, guacamole, tamales, and enchiladas mineras. We somehow managed to save a little space for delicious tres leches cake, and then we returned to the forward lounge one last time for a presentation by naturalist Megan Wehrenberg on mangrove ecosystems. Today was yet another full day, and we are excited for the opportunity to spend time searching for gray whales tomorrow!
