Eye to eye with orca in the Sea of Cortez - Mexico - includes ecotourist's guide to the Sea of Cortez

Sunset, March, 1993 by Matthew Jaffe

When an orca makes eye contact, it doesn't blink, and you can't look away. In that instant, there is a temptation to put a human stamp on the moment, to claim some kind of communion with the whale. But as I started into the eye of a male orca swimming just a few feet away, it seemed futile to impose such conceits a few feet away, it seemed futile to impose such conceits on this creature, with his 10 tons of physical superiority and obvious though separate intelligence. He was assessing me entirely on his own indefinable terms.

Breaking the dead calm water with the great triangle of his dorsal fin, the orca had surfaced, rolled slightly for a better look, and fixed me in his gaze as he cruised alongside our panga, the traditional high-bowed fishing skiff of the Sea of Cortez. All around the panga, a pod of 20 orcas surged through the water. Huge, fast, and playful, the whales disappeared and reappeared, strutting their stuff in a display of pure power and grace.

Back on the 80-foot Don Jose, the Baja Expeditions boat that served as our hotel, restaurant, and classroom for this natural history trip through 500 miles of Mexico's 800-mile-long desert sea, it struck me that the orcas and our boatload of 18 tourists had come to this spot near the rocky outcrop of Los Islotes for the same reason: sea lions. We had come to snorkel at the 300-animal rookery, whose members dazzled us with their swimming prowess. The orcas no doubt appreciated the sea lions less for their grace and more for their taste.

Until the orca encounter, it had been easy to watch with detachment as the Cortez served up its truly movable feast. On that day, however, my assumed position at the apex of the food chain had depended entirely on the whales' ability to distinguish between their preferred prey and my wet-suited hide.

As I bit into a fish taco made from the morning's catch, I understood more clearly, to paraphrase The Beatles, that the lunch you take is potentially equal to the lunch you'll make. That's the way "ecotourism" works: you gain the perspective that comes not only from observing but also from occasionally being observed; from being part of the system, not separate from it.

For many years, the Sea of Cortez (identified on some maps as the Sea of Cortes or the Gulf of California) was known, if at all, as a playground for a Hollywood crowd that came for the best sportfishing in the world. Sportfishing enthusiasts still make their way to the sea in large numbers to pursue the objects of their desire: marlin, yellowtail, dorado, and roosterfish. But, increasingly, another kind of traveler is being drawn here for ecotourism trips that focus on the sea's incomparable combination of rare desert creatures and abundant marine wildlife.

After a week on the Sea of Cortez, these travelers don't tend to talk about getting back to "the real world," the useful if rationalized term for resuming our daily lives following a break in routine. After all, it's difficult to argue that the exhaust fumes of a truck on the freeway are somehow more real than the salty, fishy scent of a blue whale spout wafting over you as the 150-ton animal swims just yards away.

"Most people live in an urban world, filled with cars and streets and buses," says Ronn Storro-Patterson, whose tour company Biological Journeys has run ecology-oriented Cortez trips since 1979. "The Sea of Cortez is a wake-up call from a world of a different time, place, and rhythm. Nature dominates."

On Isla San Esteban, one of 50 or so islands arrayed like steppingstones across the sea's narrow Midriff region, the desert blooms along an arroyo recarved by surging runoff from a recent storm. A 2-foot-long pinto chuckwalla, a lizard found nowhere else in the world, makes its way along a spike-covered organpipe cactus, now swollen with the rain. From rocky offshore islands veiled by low clouds, the muffled barks of sea lions reach over the water to the desert wash.

Both the sea lions and the chuckwalla owe their survival to the geologic forces that created the ocean basin, one of the world's youngest. About 5 million years ago, the San Andreas Fault tore off what is now the Baja peninsula from mainland Mexico. The Pacific Ocean filled the gap, making islands out of the chunks of land that had broken off from both land masses. Volcanoes created still more islands.

Troughs as deep as 10,000 feet score the seafloor. The sea's remarkably prolific food chain starts with upwellings of cold, nutrient-rich water from these submarine canyons. This water promotes growth of the phytoplankton that feeds the simple creatures that in turn set the table for the sea's more advanced diners: sportfish, marine mammals such as sea lions, and humans.

Though terrestrial life is less abundant, scientists often compare the sea's islands to the Galapagos as living laboratories for the study of natural selection. Evolving in isolation under a different set of conditions from its cousins on neighboring islands or the mainland, the pinto chuckwalla has different coloring from its nearby relatives and weighs nearly twice as much. In fact, the pinto chuckwalla is considered a separate species.