Blue footed, yellow footed and brown footed (they are fairly rare we’re told) Boobies nest on this island along with frigates. The other animal inhabitants are iguanas. There are so many you have to watch where you step or you might step on one.

...watch where you step....

Ann and friend

Since the island is protected (it was given the status of Parque Nacional and World Heritage Site in 2003) the animals here flourish without fear. It’s been named the Galapagos of Mexico. You can walk right up to a nesting bird or sunning iguana and they just look at you; “eh, another tourist”. Even at that there are very few tourists as the island lies more than 15 miles off of a coast without a large city to “breed” tourists. So mostly just “yatistas” visit and occasionally a more organized nature trip.

After arriving here early in the morning, we were anxious to get ashore and had the dinghy pumped up and in the water by 0900. We motored to the only beach area in the only protected (from wind and wave) cove on the island to go ashore. There is a small fishing camp here where a few Mexican fishermen make their living fishing the water around the island. There were very friendly as we landed between their pangas, but none spoke enough English, so we moved past the beach up onto the island proper to see the birds.

The only inhabitants of the island live in this fish camp

“See” them doesn’t really do this experience justice. You are more “one” with them. The Frigates, which are huge-six foot wingspans-nest just barely above your head in the small wind swept trees. As we walked among them, you could reach out and touch their nests (we didn’t of course). Numerous nests had young fuzzy baby Frigates not yet old enough to fly. Some of the birds were also nesting on the ground, so between the Frigates and the iguanas, we chose our path very carefully. We’re talking hundreds of Frigates all around you in areas the size of a small house. There were literally dozens in every tree, many with babies. And the noise! Almost deafening. Sqawking and clacking their bills, this is where the word; “cacophony” must have come from. And we won’t even attempt to describe the smell. Along every few trees one of the males would display his colors whereby he would “blow up” his throat, ballooning to a brilliant red against the mostly black body. When we had a moment to look down, we would see several iguanas every couple yards ranging from little lizard size up to two feet long. Attired in flip flops, I took early inventory and carefully counted my toes before we moved on.

Frigate madness

Frigate hatchling

Male Frigate

So, Frigates live mostly in trees. OK, then where were the Boobies? The answer turns out to be symbiotic in that they live on the rocks. So, carefully tracing our steps back to the beach so we wouldn’t disturb or step on all the wildlife, we headed to the other end of the beach where hundreds of Boobies were nesting on the rocks overlooking our cove (multiply these quantities of many hundreds, maybe thousands per acre by the volume of an island a mile wide and several miles long, which is the length of the island, and you get a feel for how many birds nest here).

Ann of the boobies...

Boobies we came to see and Boobies we got. They are even more unafraid than the Frigates. You can walk right up to a nesting Booby and they will just sit there. Many were sitting on eggs and were keeping their hatchlings warm. Unconcerned and showing no fear, they would stand up and show us either eggs or a small fuzzy hatchling, still just with little stumps where they would eventually grow wings, then sit back down.

Boobie hatchling

Yes, my feet are blue...

Since they were nested so densely and in order not to unduly alarm any of them, I stayed at the base of the rocky point so Ann could explore to the top. We saw blue feet, yellow feet and red feet of the three types of Boobies.

...More blue feet...

We arrived at 0730. Coming in we could tell this place was going to be “wild”. Thousands of seabirds were soaring the winds above the island and in the last 5 miles coming in at around sunrise, we must have seen half a dozen whales breaching and otherwise jumping around. Ann swore she saw one do a back flip. I told her she was nuts until I saw the same thing later in the day from our anchorage.

As we approached the island, I woke up in the middle of the night and heard Ann talking up on deck. At first, in my sleepy haze and not knowing exactly where I was, I just assumed she was on the phone. Then with full consciousness coming on I remembered we were about 50 miles off the coast of Mexico and thought; “Has all this sailing sent her over the edge?” Climbing out of the bunk at around 0230, I slipped out of the quarterberth and up the companion way ladder, hearing a lilting voice; “Where are you? Come on out. Come back and play some more”. What the heck? The answer become clear in a couple seconds when I heard a splash and ‘whoof’. Dolphins playing by the stern. The dolphin whisperer was back.

Ann is the only person I have ever seen who can in fact, talk to the dolphins. During the day, when she laughs with joy at them, they jump out of the water in response. Now at night her lilting voice got them to spin around Charisma and talk back. They were chattering at her. Her voice must have a frequency that they like.

(From Ann) Actually they frightened me at first. I am on early morning watch and keep hearing puffs and smelling fish. I look around and because the moon as set already I see nothing. I even stand up on the deck and look, sure that something is about to get me – like a pod of killer whales! Then I realize that we are just off of the penal colony island where I read about an escape just as we got to La Paz. Now I’m really concerned. I think to myself, if it were dolphins I would see their phosphorescent trail in the water, right? And suddenly there it was! There were lots of trails as the dolphins played around the stern! My friends were back. (I tried to keep it quiet but found that both keeping my voice down and keeping on course became a problem. Oops!) BACK TO BOB…

This leg was about 90 miles and turned out to take us 21 hours. Of that time, we motored one and a half hours out of Mazatlan and ran under very shortened sail coming into Isabel, slowing from 6 knots to 3 knots for about 4 hours, in order to delay our arrival until after sunrise. All in all, this was a nice passage with fairly light winds most of the way. For the most part we were seeing 8 knot winds, but they went from 17 gusting to 25 for a couple hours just after sunset, to about 2 knots for a couple of hours on Ann’s watch around 0100. We didn’t see any other boats closer than 7 miles and those were probably fishing boats nearer the coast than we were. Overall a nice sail.