San francisco and the sea of cortez - A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer - page 55

was led by Dr. George Lindsay, director of the Academy, who had done
considerable work on the cactuses of Baja California and the islands
of the Gulf of California. Participants were selected on the basis of their
knowledge in a particular specialty of biology. The team included,
among others, Dusty Chivers and Alejandro Villalobos, invertebrate
biology; Dr. Robert Orr, mammals; Ray Bandar, reptiles; Dr. Ira Wig-
gins, botany; Chris Parrish, scorpions; and Dr. Earl Herald, ichthyol-
ogy. Dusty and I were the diving biologists, and George Tsegeletos from
Marin Divers was hired as the underwater photographer. The expedi-
tion was funded by Academy supporter Roy Marquardt, founder of
the Marquardt Corporation, manufacturer of rocket engines. Roy's
teenage son Bruce went along with us.
EXPEDITION TO THE GULF
That June we flew from the Tijuana airport to Loreto in a twelve-
passenger 1939 Lockheed Lodestar piloted by Francisco Muñoz.
(This was the same type of plane Amelia Earhart flew in her ill-fated
attempt to fly around the world.) At Loreto we boarded the converted
landing craft Marisla, owned by American expatriate Dick Adcock and
his Mexican wife, Marylou. It was equipped as a dive boat, complete
with scuba tanks, dive weights, and an air compressor for filling tanks.
In the ten days of the expedition we covered almost all of the Gulf
islands from Loreto south, on land and beneath the sea. It was my first
time diving in tropical waters, and I was fascinated by the totally di¤er-
ent and incredibly rich marine life of the Gulf of California. At Isla
Las Animas, a remote rock pinnacle that juts up out of deep water, gi-
ant groupers ( Epinephelus itajara ) followed me around as I collected
and photographed. It was as though they were wondering what this
strange bubble-blowing creature was doing at their island. Here we had
glimpses of the legendary hammerhead sharks ( Sphyrna lewini ), which
congregate by the hundreds at certain times of the year around rocky
pinnacles like Isla Las Animas and submarine seamounts like El Bajo.
This was my first time to see colonies of wonderful garden eels wav-
ing in the current as they fed on tiny drifting zooplankton.
We'd set up holding tanks on board the Marisla to hold the fishes