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Daily Journal
Cochrane High School
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 The thought of fresh caught shrimp for dinner enticed us to visit the shrimp boat.  Our crew radioed the shrimp boat Captain and asked permission for us to visit. The Captain granted us permission so we headed off and boarded his boat.  He gave us a tour of the boat and it was surprisingly clean and organized. |
 The Mexican culture is mostly Catholic and the fishermen had a special area for prayer on the boat.  A basket of shrimp heads that would be used as bait.  Another basket had an assortment of fish to include Scorpion fish (Stonefish). |
 The boat had all sorts of cool dead stuff. Squid ...  A small Torpedo Electric Ray (forgot to tell the kid it was electric and he ended up with a perm. No worries it will grow out.)  One of the crew goes down in the ice hold to weigh out several kilos of shrimp for our dinner tonight. |
 What a cool experience. Wonder what's next on the list of adventures? |
 Milly, one of the cooks, cleans the shrimp. Our next adventure takes us to the isolated communities of Punta Alto, Las Cuevas and Nopolo.  We watched the fishermen jigging for tuna.  What a catch!!!! |
 We went a shore to watch as the fishermen were laying out the days catch. Sharks, and lots of them.  Dan, Stephanie and Shelley pose behind a manta ray. |
 Karen and Graeme pose with other rays to include Cownose and Cortez stingrays.  We got to watch the fishermen fillet their days catch putting the meat into salt brine mined at a local salt pan similar to the ones we visited Day 3. |
 Antonia, one of the residents of Punta Alto, makes beautiful needlepoint artwork which she sells.  We distributed gifts here and you can see the story unfold (and it is pretty cool) in the Baja Gifts section of this Daily Journal. |
 After our gift giving visit we received one in return. The presence of two beautiful humpback whales. They were swimming in the very bay we were to snorkel in. One of the whales I recognized from years back when it was the most playful little punk a person could be blessed to encounter. And yet it has once again come back to say hi and bless the waters that we would be swimming in. How cool is that?  Gracie, the whale, surfaced...  Humped it's back to dive...  Fluked, (tail out of the water to dive), dove and disappeared. We followed the whales for awhile but they were not interested in hanging with us so we left and headed back to the bay we first met them.  The Cochrane group plunges off the top of the boat before heading out to snorkel.  The rest of the group headed to shore to snorkel off the beach.  The snorkel was brilliant and enjoyed tremendously. We saw octopus, scorpion fish and all sorts of huge cool fish.  The night ended with the game "Sardines". Similar to hide and seek. Like they wouldn't be found hiding under the lounge chairs. Yipes!!!! |
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We gracefully stumbled out of our bunks to a
delicious breakfast thanks to Paloma and Mily (our superb cooks). We began
our exciting day on the wonderful "Geomar III" shrimp boat. We
got to see many different dead fish and an assortment of pooping birds but
not on the fish. It was dodgy. Soon after buying a large sack of shrimp we continued our day. |
| Day 1 and 2 |
Day 3 | Day 4 |
Day 5 | Day 6 |
Day 7 and 8 Baja Gifts Program | Back To Main Page |
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