Santa Catalina Day Off

I woke up at 7:30 today so I could catch a zodiac for a hike and snorkeling at Santa Catalina on my first Baja day off. After gathering snorkel gear and a quick bite of chicken tortilla scrambled eggs and blueberry oat pancakes left for the island and joined a hike one of our naturalists, Sharon, was leading. Sharon speculated that the island had gotten some of the recent hurricane activity because the barrel cactus were doing beautifully and she could feel some moisture in the air. This is the only part of the world where you can find barrel cactus which are very tall and multi limbed. Which incidentally is not a term the naturalists used.

The area here is uninhabited and yet the trail we took was nearly perfect because it was an ‘arryo’, a dry river bed. Santa Catalina is the only home of the rattle-less rattlesnake. We didn’t see any of these but we did see hummingbirds, mockingbirds, ravens, woodpeckers, and even a Christmas cardinal. As for plants there were many barrel cactus as well as the aptly named Japanese lantern plant, indigo, night blooming jasmine and other things which I don’t remember the names of. Oh! We saw desert mistletoe.

If you were to walk alone here, which I can do next time, you would be able to experience a quiet unlike you can find anywhere I’ve been before. You’d have chattering birds but that’s about it.

Coming back from the hike, it is a very different thing to go from desert Wil-E Coyote/Roadrunner terrain to the lapping of waves against a beach of smooth granite rocks.

We took the zodiac from here back to the SeaBird only to board almost immediately again to go out snorkeling. And there I swallowed quite a bit of salt water, got a saline wash for my eyeballs, and saw some beautiful sea life with Daisey and Tom. I pestered a pufferfish (to no avail), surveyed a starfish (blue), hovered over some urchins (yeah, there goes the alliteration.), was enamored by the little blue neon fish, and stung by a jelly for the first time.

After lunch and a nap I could tell we must have sighted something because the boat had slowed down. Sure enough I could hear strange eerie shrill shrieking from my cabin and then Jackie’s footsteps coming down the focsle stairs to verbosely announce “Dolphins. Hundreds.” We ran upstairs and watched with the rest of the boat as these hundreds of playful water mammals jumped around in the water, sometimes following to boat, sometimes jumping full body lengths out of the air.

It was a good day off.