Oct. 8-12. Punta Islotes (28 48.589'N, 113 21.241'W)

The Punta Islotes anchorage has stunning scenery: the Las Animas Valley opens into the southeast corner of this bay, and tall mountains rise up all around. For the moment, following the summer rainy season, the mountains are green, creating a stunning contrast with the red, black, and tan rocks. Waves lap at a wide sand beach; three large, low-lying rocks stationed at the opening of the cove stand ready to tame any large swells that roll in. Tucked into a small beach among the rocks is a fish camp, with deserted shacks, tangled fish nets, and assorted bits of flotsam. Every now and then a panga will glide into the calm water near the camp, anchoring to clean their catch, inevitably attracting a cloud of hopeful seabirds.

The remote cove at Punta Islotes can be accessed by a 20-mile-long "road" from Bahia LA, as evidenced by a couple of camps on the beach when we arrived. One of these, which looked more or less permanent, was composed of an eclectic collection of vehicles and structures, including an old Airstream camper, another older camper covered by a wooden roof, a small plywood outbuilding draped with assorted tarps, and two overturned pangas. During each daytime low tide, the two Mexican men who occupied this camp would take a large white bucket and go collecting in the exposed rocks. When I kayaked ashore one day, I said hello and asked what they were collecting. The guy tipped the bucket toward me. It was filled almost to the brim with thousands of hermit crabs living in inch-long snail shells. The man told me that he and his partner collect the crabs and sell them for use in aquariums. Talk about a niche market....When I asked what the Spanish name for hermit crab is, the man told me "caracol," which is the Spanish word for "snail"; apparently it doesn't matter who occupies the shell.

A small estuary winds behind the beach, navigable by dinghy at high tide. One day, Eric and I explored the estuary by dinghy. It was heavily populated with sting rays, which darted up from the sand as we glided over them. Fun to explore by dinghy; not a good place to swim.

SCOOTS really needed to have her belly cleaned, as she had acquired a lush marine ecosystem that included large swaths of crusting growth, small communities of clinging barnacles, hordes of tiny shrimp, lawns of hair-like things, forests of things that looked like six-inch-long Dr. Seuss trees, and other assorted sea life. Our recently-purchased guide to marine invertebrates wasn't particularly helpful for identifying our ecosystem inhabitants. But that's ok: I prefer not to become too familiar with the critters that I'm about to forcibly remove from the bottom of our boat.

We set up our hookah rig on deck, collected our tools, and suited up. Our hookah rig is a small air compressor with a long hose and regulator that allows us to breathe underwater. Our tools consisted of a wooden spatula, a wide metal drywall scraper, and a green scrubby pad for scraping the hull; and a screwdriver for unclogging the through-hulls. We suited up in bathing suits, long-sleeved rash guards, masks, fins, gloves, and, in my case, as I seem to be particularly good at acquiring stings from invisible jellyfish, full-length yoga pants.

Eric went in first, using the hookah while he scraped the prop shaft, prop, and the keel. All was going well, until a few minutes later, when he got a line of jellyfish stings on his leg. Ow. He came up and we sprayed the sting with lots of vinegar, which deactivated the toxin and soon eased the pain.

I went down next, covered from the neck down in my anti-jellyfish clothing, and resumed scraping the Dr. Seuss trees off the bottom of the keel. All was going well, until I felt a sharp burning/stinging sensation on my neck. An invisible string-of-pearls jellyfish had found the chink in my armor, and wrapped around my exposed neck. Ow. I came up out of the water quickly, stripped to my bathing suit, and Eric doused my neck with vinegar.

As we were standing on the swim step, waiting for the vinegar to take effect, we realized that the hookah hose led from one side of the boat to the other, between the prop shaft and the hull. Ugh. Someone would need to swim the hose back through to the other side. Since I was still wearing my bathing suit, which was considerably more than Eric was wearing at the moment, I volunteered to swim back through. Besides, I thought, what were the chances of encountering another string-of-pearls during the thirty seconds it would take me to swim from one side of the boat to the other?

The answer: 100%. Yep, in the time it took me to swim underneath the boat from one side to the other, one long string-of-pearls wrapped around my left arm from my wrist to my shoulder, and another wrapped around my leg. Ow. I came up on the swim step, where Eric doused my new stings in vinegar.

Eric's jellyfish stings faded away to nothing within a few hours, while mine swelled up and itched, much like poison oak, for the next three days, the sting marks lingering for another ten days. (Life is fair, though: Eric's skin overreacts to jejene bites, while mine doesn't.) On a lighter note, one series of stings made a mark on my arm that looked like an anchor tattoo. A bit of nautical art to carry with me for a few days.