Monday, July 1

North 23° 12.883’
West 109° 27.179’
Distance: 17.0 miles

We paddled 17.0 miles today. When I pulled my journal out this morning I noticed that my map bag had leaked and my journal is wet. Mike found that his sunscreen had leaked in his bathroom bag. These two disasters consumed us till about 10:30 in the morning. Once again we see that anything we own out here can be lost, stolen, broken, rusted, or soaked. I am running our of possessions which have not been the victim of one or more of those. Breakfast of eggs, tortillas, avocado, tomato, and cheese while things dried. We left at 10:30 and at 11:00 we hit Cabo Pulmo which is a pretty little town on a bay with a reef surrounded by mountains and with lots of white sand beaches. That town will explode with tourists someday. We bought water, another avocado, cheese, and some beans. We just need a couple more days of food till we hit San Lucas. We continued until about 3:00pm when the wind came up hard in our faces again. It seems to be the pattern. We rested until about 6:00pm, then continued for about another hour and a quarter. We wanted to go on longer but we were finding big surf on the beaches in places. We were afraid that with the sun going down we might find ourselves in a position where we were forced to land in the dark through the surf on an unknown beach – maybe into rocks. We wanted no risk of that. Mike got crunched a bit coming in, but I got luckier in timing the waves. A group of Mexicans watched us from the cliff probably wondering if they were going to have to rescue us. The beach here is steep so that the waves crash right on to the sand. This is the first sign we have seen that we are getting close to the wild Pacific Ocean. By my map we have less than thirty five miles left to go. Today we passed the easternmost point on our journey and last night was our easternmost camp. By tomorrow we will be going more west than south. We want to get an early start tomorrow and try to beat the wind. We want to get past San Jose del Cabo of possible tomorrow. For the past year and a half I have been planning this trip. For three months I have been paddling. Now I am within a couple days work of completing my goal. This is quite exciting. I know little will change when we get there. There will be no party. Nobody will know that we are finishing a journey. Nobody will care. We won’t be going home. We will still be living in kayaks. The vacation will not be over for another month. But this will fulfill for me an ambition that goes back to High School – to complete a long journey from end to end of some geographical boundary under my own power and with my own resources. Camping, cooking, everything on my own. I have always loved sleeping outside and that aspect of the trip has been a special treat for me. Also, I have seen the entire eastern coast of the Baja peninsula and have found it to be wonderful beyond my expectation or imagination. The people, both Mexican and Gringo, have been fantastically friendly and helpful. I have renewed my interest in learning Spanish and have come a long way toward that goal. I know it is a little early to start summing my experiences, but I now feel that the rest of the long part of my trip is just details. One more city to deal with, and a couple more camps. This is a pretty satisfying evening for me. I guess the fact that we made a good distance today makes the rest seem easy. We will soon see if that is true or not.