Carnival in mazatlán - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 92

cess, a place to stay that was at least one step up from sleeping on the
beach, and an anchorage where the fish receivers were protected from
ocean swells. We also needed to be where the big boat could come in
later to pick up the fish.
We decided that a place called Los Frailes came closest to meeting
our needs. Los Frailes is around the point from Cabo Pulmo, glow-
ingly described in John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts's wonderful philo-
sophical and biological account of their 1940 expedition to the Gulf,
Sea of Cortez. Cabo Pulmo is one of only two coral reefs in the Sea of
Cortez; Los Frailes is the other one. Because of its uniqueness, in 1995
Cabo Pulmo was designated a marine park in which the taking of all
marine life is prohibited.
There were no accommodations at Los Frailes, but thirteen dirt-road
miles away was Punta Colorada, a small sportfishermen's resort run by
Bob Van Wormer. Bob Kiwala had become friends with Van Wormer
in 1964 when Bob towed a two-person submarine down from San Fran-
cisco to Punta Colorada; there he and Ted Hobson, a UCLA post-
doctoral student, used the submarine to do night and day behavior ob-
servations of the reef fishes of the Gulf. Van Wormer would give us a
reasonable rate to stay at his place, which was close enough to the col-
lecting area for us to commute. Everything seemed to be working out
fine, and we were all looking forward to collecting at Los Frailes. The
team this time was Bob Kiwala, Kelly McColloch, and I, plus a friend
of Kelly's, Ray Szymczak, who planned to drive down in his own Dat-
sun pickup truck just for the fun of it.
We left San Diego, the truck piled high with the usual collecting
gear, and headed south to Mazatlán and the ferry. This time, how-
ever, we had cleverly found out the dates of Carnival and, unbeknownst
to Sea World or Scripps, had planned our San Diego departure so we
would “just happen” to arrive in Mazatlán on the first day of the cel-
ebration. Sea World management never did find out about that little
scheme.
Four days later, we somehow made it to the ferry and across the Gulf
to La Paz. After stocking up at the mercado and making a stop at the
cerveza distributor, we drove south toward Punta Colorada. A few miles
south of the Buena Vista fishing resort it began to sprinkle. This was