Caleta Partida, Day 2

Sunrise on Saturday December 3

Our new friends left first thing in the morning to go back to La Paz. We were sad to see them go. Not long after they left, a park ranger boat came into the anchorage and inspected each of the boat’s park passes. The park ranger asked if we had a dog.

We went to shore after we finished our chores. It was around 1300 (1:00 pm) and the tide was at its lowest point. As we got closer to shore, we could see that that there were indeed two sandbars, separated by a channel. The closer sandbar was quite narrow, was actually more rocks than sand, and was attached to Espiritu Santo. It had one house on it. The farther sandbar looked to be much wider and mostly sand. It was attached to Isla Partida and had quite a few structures on it.

We got as close to the channel as we could until the dinghy was nearly grounded. We dropped the anchor. The Espiritu Santo sandbar was behind Eric.

We walked to the Isla Partida sandbar to check out the structures. It was crazy to think that we could easily walk between islands!

Since this was a national park, we knew no one lived here, so we figured this had to be a fish camp, or a base for the fishermen. The structures in the fish camp looked pretty rough.

At the end of the sandbar was the channel that lead out to the Sea of Cortez from the east side of the island. We were surprised that it was relatively deep in the channel. You can see the sharp color change where the depth changed.

Looking north to Isla Partida

Looking west, at the anchorage.

We hopped back into the dinghy and went to the cove directly north of our boat.

There was supposed to be a nice hiking trail there. We got as close to shore as we could with the dinghy, but we were grounded pretty far away from the shoreline.

When we started walking, we realized it was a mud flat, not sand. It was pretty gross to walk around in the mud. It was squishy and our feet sank, and there were crabs and other crawly things everywhere.

We did make it relatively close to shore before we gave up and decided to come back another time.

We went back to Kosmos and waited for the tide to rise. At 1630 (4:30 pm), we went back out at. The 3/4 full moon was high in the sky and vibrant.

There was plenty of water in the space between the sandbars.

Here was our ride through the channel between the islands.

Since there was so much swell, we turned around well before we got to the tips of the islands. We beached the dinghy on the protected part of the Partida sandbar. We walked around on the sand bar for a while. Someone had made a walking trail from the fish camp to the sea side.