La Paz, Mexico

I had walked for hours under the blistering sun. Brown and sand colored dogs were sleeping in the dust. They looked like dead dogs.

Then it was getting dark and I walked into a loud crowd. A stranger offered me a shot of tequila. The noise made it difficult to hear. It somehow came across that I was driving.

We tried to speak for a while. I told him about our boat and said that it was maybe a month sailing to Marquesas. I could tell that he had no idea what I was talking about. I wanted to know everything about the crowd and the tall pointed hats, but didn't want to be perceived as too much of a tourist. 

Now that I've cut down on my drinking I've come to appreciate the alienated inebriation of ignorance. 

Dolphins and Dreams

It's frustrating to photograph dolphins in the wild. You can never tell when and where they will jump, if they jump at all. But Nina managed to take this picture just after we anchored outside an open beach in Mexico. Maybe a hundred dolphins passed by, and one of the very last made the jump.

The dolphins returned that night. We could hear the high-pitched squeeking through Bika's hull. But we also heard a strange shuffling sound, as if the dolphins were breathing out just below the sur- face. They probably scared fish towards the beach.

I once shared a hospital room with a demented man. He was old but full of energy. He often paced restless around at night, with his slippers shuffling over the linoleum floor.

Still in a dream I heard the pod of dolphins. I thought it was the old man - an army of him. "Where am I?" he kept asking.

The humpbacks

We saw two humpbacks one evening. We'd just anchored off a beach. It was all in the open but flat calm.

It might have been a female and a calf. They both breached several times. But then the mother, or so it seemed, started to slap the dorsal fin. We could hear the fluke banging. Again and again. I thought gee, this looks pretty aggressive. And then they headed over to Bika.


Hanging on to the shrouds I suddenly remembered the night I got drunk on Grand Isle. I was just about ready to discuss anything. But the next day I heard I was just being opinionated.

The humpbacks circled our little boat. I was afraid they would snatch the anchor line, but they seemed totally in control. Nina used a cam recorder that strangely didn't record anything. No splashes, no nothing.

But the humpbacks rounded us like a buoy, all grace and beauty.