Magdalena Bay
“I must have shot 100 pictures,” admitted Jane, who arose with the 6:30 sunrise. Rippled pink clouds roll across nearly half the sky, harbinger of the day’s intense pleasures.
Three hours later, the National Geographic Sea Bird floats through the fog into Magdalena Bay, passing on our left the old Punta Belcher whaling station and on our right Santa Margarita Island, blurred outlines in the mist. Silence onboard, shapes cut through the mist: three or four lonely gulls, a couple of pongas, a dozen pelicans, flying low. “Five grey whales at 11:00! One at center, 12:00!” exclaims Lee. A half mile ahead, black mounds roll, ghostly spouts up, then tails down as they dive.
In 1845, Carlos tells us, two American whaling ships must have seen a similar sight, as they discovered an untapped Pacific resource—grey whales. For nearly two decades, January and February were gory months on this coast, as whalers from Scammon’s and San Ignacio Lagoons and Magdalena Bay pursued mother whales into shallow waters and, when sixteen or eighteen feet away, shot a “bomb-lance” at the trapped beast. Many enraged females, separated from offspring, attacked boats, giving greys the reputation, in Captain Scammon’s words, as “possessed of unusual sagacity.” What was once Scammon’s “aquatic battle-scene” with 25 or more whale boats lowered for the hunt, is today an eerily peaceful lagoon, a charmed nursery where National Geographic Sea Bird’s Zodiacs carry awed travelers, not greedy harpooners, toward the mother and baby whales.
“Speaking of grey…” notes our Zodiac driver on our return to the ship from Sand Dollar beach on Isla Magdalena. He was referring to whales, but grey is also the color of the morning—fog and washed out skies and a silver-grey island, sand dunes traced with pale green sand verbena and sea purslane (Sesuvium verrucosum, as William tells me later), dotted with oases of shells—clams and scallops, brown murex snails and sand dollars. At 11:00am we land on the island, and clutches of shipmates trudge through fine sand to the Pacific coast, Sand Dollar Beach, at mid-day deserted. I sense no one wants to leave, but dutifully hikers return to the Zodiacs at 12:30pm, as instructed. A hamburger/ribs/ice-cream bar picnic lunch rewards our punctuality.
In the afternoon we move north in the estuary, a Mexican pilot, Alejandro Camacho, steering the National Geographic Sea Bird through the narrow channel. Mangroves slip by. Sometimes we see a flash of white as an egret unfolds its wings. The landscape here is horizontal, so unlike the verticality of the gulf. It is a solemn, deserted place. Near Puerto Adolpho López Mateos, where we will dock for the night, Carlos sings out: “One o’clock, mother and baby.” For the next hour more than a dozen grey whales surface, spotted by their “bushy…sometimes heart shaped” spouts (as Lee notes in her late afternoon grey whale talk). A black column appears as a head lurches from the water— “a spy hop,” says Lee. And then a leviathan swims close to the boat, its bulk and scored back and striated tail momentarily revealed. For that moment, it seems within reach. Magical. An intense pleasure.
