This blog is starting to sound trite to me. It's so easy to slip into travel log mode, describing each day's sail, the spots where we anchor, telling about the wonderful water and the critters we see while snorkeling. The fact is, though, that I'm sure such accounts get even more repetitive in the reading than they do in the writing. I mean, how many different ways can you describe The Perfect Bay.

What makes adventures interesting is the IMperfection. Perfection is really kind of boring. Heaven, as it's generally described, is the teller's idea of perfection and it always sounds boring to me all filled with golden light and vertical lines or whatever. It's the imperfection of mortals that makes life interesting.

Soon after setting off on this voyage I wrote a Rogue's Gallery edition on one of my crew. I told a story, MY story, of the conflict I had with him. Now THAT was a good story with drama and cursing and threats and reconciliation. Robert didn't like it, though, and wrote a dissertation on how I'd gotten it all wrong. In his version he converted the picture of hell he thought I'd painted around him into a limbo, if not a heaven, tinging it with golden light and softening all my dark, jagged lines into gentle curves by pronouncing me "sadly deluded."

I felt his pain and was ashamed that I'd brought it upon him. My apologies were not accepted as far as I know. Perhaps that's because, rather than retract my story, I only published his to let people judge on their own who was deluded and who was not. My friend, Kevin, says he recoiled at his first reading of my Robert-geddon account, thinking I'd ripped my crew "a new one" in public, but I'd only tried to write my side of the truth. Truth, it seems, is fluid.

Back to the travel log: When we arrived in Candelero we'd laid out a two part plan for our day of conquest on the bay. The guide book wrote of a good trail up the canyon beyond the sandy beach to the east. We'd do that in the morning while it was cool and the sun was low in the sky. Afterwards, when the sun was higher and gave better light for snorkeling, we'd snorkel around Roca Monumento.

After Mitch and I lowered the dinghy into the water I gave the newbie a quick lesson in operating the engine and sent him off to figure the rest out for himself while I grabbed my Tevas and filled up my water bottle. He managed to make it back to Mabrouka alive and with the dinghy intact, so he was still doing well in his seamanship classes.

The hike was surprisingly good, with a little clambering here and there over red sandstone and under overhangs worn lacey by wind and rain. Here and there large fig trees had oozed their roots down through the rock's rosy faces, dripping in wooden flows like wax from a candle left burning on a dinner table long after the meal had finished.

Not wanting to rush our hike to a conclusion, we forsook the trail we'd come up on and climbed over the rocks and through the gullies of the dry stream bed back to the beach. Not yet sated, we mounted the small point that split Candelero in two to stand on its rocky outcrop for a while, watching the long, slender form of a Mexican hound fish prowl the shallows.

The rest of our stay would become a staple of our trip, ...pulling on fins and masks, popping our snorkels in our mouths, jumping over the side, and letting hours of the day dissolve into the warm, clear water while multi-colored fish entertained us on a backdrop of rock and coral. Monument Rock took us a couple of hours to explore, then we returned to Mabrouka and set off for El Cardoncito a short half hour motor north to the southern end of the next island, Isla Partida.



Although Caleta Partida was highly recommended by our guide book, we were relishing our solitude and went for the smaller, less popular cove one notch up the island. It took us a few tries to get our anchor to set in the rocky bottom, but success eventually made us secure for the night and we plotted our attack for the next day in a similar fashion as for Candelero.