Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
The next morning we headed out to Los Frailes on a reconnaissance
trip. The dirt road had now turned to slippery mud, and the thirteen
miles took two hours. Our well-thought-out plan was falling apart;
clearly, collecting at Los Frailes was impossible. The hard work of col-
lecting and keeping everything together was enough without having
to fight a barely passable road two or more times a day. What to do
now? Here we were in Baja with no means of communication and no
alternate place to work.
The pressure was on. We knew we had to get the fish, and we were
not about to concede defeat and just go home. We hated to do it, but
rather than pick a totally unknown place to set up base camp and col-
lect, we decided to go back to the Cape, even though we had planned
to leave the fish there alone.
The lack of any other protected cove to anchor the fish receivers was
the main factor in our decision. Settling for an unprotected place would
have been an invitation to disaster. The first ocean swells that came in,
if they did not simply tear the receivers loose to wash ashore, would
otherwise have exhausted and eventually killed the poor fish huddled
inside the constantly moving netting.
Getting back on the main graded road, we found the rain had been
quite local: toward the Cape everything was dry. A heavy storm swell,
however, was crashing onto the beaches, and boats all along the south
coast were being washed ashore and destroyed. We found out later that
more than fifty sportfishing boats were lost in Baja from this unex-
pected storm.
We arrived at the Cape with no place to stay. The only hotel at Cabo
San Lucas, the Hacienda, was much too expensive for our modest bud-
get, and Don Scott, the former Mr. Arizona and macho bodybuilder,
was no longer in the area. While his wife, Julia, was away visiting rel-
atives he'd sold their belongings, taken the money, and skipped the coun-
try back to the States. Julia was fortunate enough to get a job as a maid
at the Hacienda Hotel. That whole situation made me ashamed to be
an American.
In the process of asking around for a place to stay we were told that
we might be able to find accommodations at the “Clinique.” The Clin-
ique was owned by a Beverly Hills doctor who supposedly set it up to
Search WWH ::
Custom Search