Thursday, June 27

North 23° 47.778’
West 109° 42.008’
Distance: 20.0 miles

We paddled 20.0 miles today. We crossed the 24th degree of latitude – just one more before we make Cabo San Lucas. We got up this morning and discovered we were just a few hundred yards from a huge fish camp. Last night Mike asked which side of the lighthouse we should land on. I kinda randomly picked the left. If I had picked the right we would have been right in the camp. I am amazed that with all those people and vehicles that there were no lights last night. No fires, nothing. This lighthouse is a large concrete tower with a wall around id. Some one made stairs over the wall by pounding out the cinder blocks, so I climbed over. The tower is a cylinder with stairs up the middle. The door was off its hinges so I climbed up to the top. On top are the same light, battery, and solar panel as the other lighthouses. We watched the view for a while, then took off. We paddled past Ensenada de los Muertos – lots of pretty beaches and some houses. I caught two large Mexican Needlefish. Fun to catch but not worth eating. They have lots of long sharp teeth, so we have to be careful when taking them off the hook. Mike said he was going to catch a fifty pound dorado at 1:30pm, but that time came and went without a hookup. About 5:00pm we came to a beach to rest. There was a nice little hotel on the beach. Nice people – the guy is from Spain and his wife is a local. They have a pile of cute girls from 4 to 14 years old. Mike started a water fight with them and we had giggling girls all around us while we had beer and food. We got back in the boats around 8:30 and paddled for another hour. It got very dark and when we were ready to land we had no idea where the shore was or if it were sand or rocks. We found the hotel at Punta Pescadero and remembered that they had at least some sand, so we decided to land there. We could kinda see some of the rocks by the light of the hotel and we crashed on the beach through the light surf. We occupied a palapa and went to rinse ourselves in the hotel pool and to have a beer or three. Finally we went to sleep under the palapa in front of the hotel at the foot of the cliff. We need to get sleep now because the sun comes up early and we will want to be up and packed before the hotel guests started coming down.