So yesterday and today were, in short, awesome and ridiculous.

Yesterday we had our first whale watching trip, where we had to do boat transects. We collected Vero's crab traps and then headed out into the bay to record the number and behavior of whales we saw on our line. Inside the bay I don't think we saw any, but in the mouth I think we counted 17. We also saw a couple breaching, which gray whales don't do very often. We tried to do three transects, one in the bay, one in the mouth and one outside of the bay. We had to end the outside transect because the waves were too high to see any whales over them. Then we turned around and slowed down in the mouth to do photo ID. That was outrageously cool, we had two different whales swim directly under the boat. They surfaced maybe 15-20 feet away and if we had jumped out of the boat we would have landed on them. I was taking pictures, but my camera's batteries died after four pictures, since I'd been taking some all along the boat ride. We stayed out on the water and just watched whales and took pictures for while until it we realized we were already late for a Spanish class.

Then today we went out to Isla Magdalena, one of the islands forming the bay, to look at rocky intertidal zones. But to get there we had to take a 30 min boat ride and an hour hike through the mountains. There's a small fishing co-op village on Isla Magdalena that we went through. The hike started out fairly gently uphill with clearly defined paths but up by the tops of the moutains we were going on narrow, very steep footpaths. At a few points you'd have a drop off and a path only wide enough for one foot at a time. I'm pretty scared of heights and this was just about the worst kind of situation, surrounded by rocky dropoffs hiking on gravelly paths. There were a couple of times I started trembling and I almost cried twice. Going down was awful, I was terrified I was going to fall and start sliding down rock. I took a bunch of pictures from the more stable areas, hopefully you'll be able to get a sense of how steep it was. We finally got to the end and the Pacific Ocean opened up before us, it was a beautiful view.

We got onto the beach and changed shoes to look in the tidepools. My group (Kay and Lindsey) went off to a different set of pools from everyone else, and of course I fell off the first rock I stepped on to. Go figure my only injury was in the tidepools. We had to do quadrats (PVC pipe squares) and record the types of animals and plants in each square. We didn't find much, just a bunch of snails and seagrass. The goal was to see lobsters for Vero, but I don't think anyone saw anything. We stuck around for another 20 minutes and headed back.

The trip back wasn't quite as bad as the trip out, because I knew what I was getting into and it's always easier to control your weight going up. Plus by that time I had told just about everyone that I was super scared of heights and Jenna walked in front of me and kept talking to me. It really helped to be able to follow someone closely and watch their footsteps, plus Jenna's done a good amount of hiking and it made me feel better to see someone who's more confident at it. I felt soo good once I knew we were out of the steep parts.

Once we got back we had dinner and then there was a showing of a documentary this women made in one of the local towns about ecotourism in the area. It's called Ballenas de Oro (Golden Whales), I don't know if it's available anywhere, but it gave a really good view of the issues surrounding fishing and tourism in Bahia Magdalena. The permits and requirements for whale watching are getting too pricy for most locals to afford, so a lot of tourism is foreign run so it doesn't bring as much money to the towns. And creating a marine protected area would mean that a lot of fishermen would either lose their jobs or a part of their income.