MS National Geographic Sea Bird
Bahia Santa Maria and Isle Magdalena
Sunday, March 14, 2010

    This expedition began yesterday with an agreeably short two-hour flight from Los Angeles to La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico. The flight arrived in La Paz just after 2 pm. We were able to clear immigration and customs reasonably quickly and then the boarded a couple of buses for the three-hour drive across the peninsula to San Carlos where the National Geographic Sea Bird was docked. San Carlo is on the Pacific Ocean side of the Baja Peninsula. We quickly got settled in on the ship and soon we were sitting down for dinner.

    The ship cruised just a few miles out and anchored for the night off the coast of Isle Magdalena, an island that we explored this morning. I actually made two trips to the island today. The first was to greet the rising of the sun, which meant getting up about 5:15 am to prepare, grab a breakfast snack at 5:45 to tide me over until the real breakfast, and then jumping into a Zodiac for the short ride to the beach. The sun appeared about 6:50, a bit later than the official sunrise time of 6:37 due to some low clouds on the horizon. It wasn’t the most spectacular sunrise, but it was a nice way to get this expedition started. We hurried back to the Zodiacs so that we wouldn’t miss breakfast on this ship.

    By the time we got back to the ship, the rest of the group had made it out of their bunks and we all migrated to the dinner room to chow down. Before too long, it was 8:30 am and time to re-board the Zodiacs and return to the island. We split up into small groups to explore the island. Some of the younger people grabbed boogie boards and headed for both the sand dunes and the Pacific Ocean on the west side of the island. Others grouped together to join naturalist for a tour across the island, and then there were us photographers which formed a rather loosely-associated group that meandered from the east side to the west side of the island while constantly looking for interesting subjects to photograph. There are a number of species of wildflowers on the island and some beautiful sand dunes where interesting patterns have formed from the actions of wind and water. There are also a large number of sea shells scattered across the island.

    The beach on the west (Pacific) side of Isle Magdalena is widely strewn with sand dollars giving the location its name of Sand Dollar Beach. The sand dollars are deposited onto the beach by the wave action of the ocean and then the same wave action erodes some of the sand from around the shells. This leaves the many of the sand dollars appearing to stand on edge on the beach.

    We returned to the ship in time for lunch and the ship then departed for the southern tip of Baja. We originally planned to spend more time near Magdalena Bay to view whales, but this year, they left this area early. There are more whales in other locations, so that’s where we will head. About sunrise tomorrow morning, we should reach Cabo San Lucas and Land’s End. We will continue on just a little further to San Jose del Cabo where we plan to go ashore.