La Ventana - Day 4 (recap) Thursday...the sting, the wind, sal' good

Old Cactus in front of Baja Joe's

So, Thursday morning started at 7:30am with Wally knocking at my door exclaiming "Ryan, wake up dude, time to spear fish!" or something along those lines. Within minutes I was up and out the door, in the van, and on our way down the road to the reef near the hot springs.

OK, the first craziness of the day is that the van's gas tank was on empty. Wally and Glen had just filled it up the night before, and someone had siphoned the gas out during the night.........or so we thought.

Needless to say, Wally was a bit pissed...if you know Wally then you know it was a bit of an issue, so the two of us stopped at the gas station to get some gas in the bitch since the gauge read empty. After dropping $15 in the tank it started to spray out....as in the tank was full....the gauge just didn't work.
I am pretty sure Wally just didn't know that the gauge was broken, although it did occur to me that the whole "broken gauge" ordeal would be a great way to get a full tank of gas from the new guy..... heh heh heh, as in this sounds like something I would pull on the new guy!

Don't get me wrong though...Wally is one of the coolest guys I met in La Ventana, he is hella cool!!! Totally trustful and generous....but hey, I could see how it could  be a right of passage to put some gas in the van, even if I never rode in it again.  (I did get a ride back in a jeep owned by Glen from Wally later in the week...so the gas was a wash).

OK.  So there are no pictures of the spearfishing trip.  Becky didn't come and bring the flip in the water housing to document it...so all I have is prose to describe the experience to you.  It was AMAZING!

They do not call the Sea of Cortez the "world aqarium" for nothing!  It was alot like Hawaii.  Tons of fish everywhere.  In fact you can hear the fish eating away at the corral....thousands of tiny clicking sounds the entire time. 
Here is a video (taken on the second to last day we were there when we chartered a fishig boat) that you can hear the sound of the fish eating on the corral underwater and get an idea of what I was swimming in. All those clicky sounds...yes, those are the fish eating and pecking at the corral and rocks for food.

I have no pictures if this spear fishing trip, although Wally did bag a nice tigerstripe-ish 1lb parrot fish. I hadn't seen one before, and it was not the normal blue variety, but it had cool looking stripes and was greenish in color.  Later in the week I saw them at the fish market. Wally said it was incredible tasting, but I expected him to say nothing less.

We spent about 2 1/2 hours in the water, and I think I got stung by jellyfish about once every 60 seconds....do the math. Pretty much I felt like I had ran through a field of nettles for 2 hours straight. It was not pain that overwhelmed me...but it sucked nonetheless!

OK, so hear is the funny thing.  When I finally stopped spearfishing, unsuccessfully I might add, (although I did bounce a spear off of a nice 5lb parrot fish's face...they are all bone, which I did not know)...my arms and legs were burning from all of the jellyfish stings I had collected over 2 1/2 hrs of snorkeling. I am guess about 200 stings all together!

Here is the thing though....everyone, I think, has heard that in order to stop the stinging of a jellyfish sting, all one needs do is pee on the sting.  Yes, urinate on it....that is what I have heard at least. 

So that is what I did...I stood at shore and pissed in my hands and rubbed it on my arms and legs (aka. the parts that were not covered by my wetsuit shortee.) Then I waited about 5 minutes before getting into the water and washing off.

And you know what?  I would like to tell you that the stinging went away...but it didn't!  I imagine somewhere in a grave a 2,000 year old fisherman's corpse is laughing at what has to be the longest running fisherman joke on the planet.  Pee on jellyfish stings to make it quit burning and stinging....better yet, have your friends pee on your stings...not that is funny.

Moving on, we leave right about the time the wind starts to pick up.  By the time we get back to Casa Verde there are kites on the water.

So I rushed to screw the fins into my board and then proceeded to get out on the water and have some much anticipated fun.

                  

I had a great couple of rides by following the plan set the day earlier, by starting off at the campsite and making a mini down winder to Baja Joe's. The trip lasted about 30 minutes, which I then walked up and did twice. I practiced my turns and transitions, and even one jump...although I didn't land it.

All in all a good couple runs, and my skills of getting back to my board by body dragging upwind have really improved since last summer, so that made board retrieval much easier. Also Becky and I each have an Ocean Rodeo Go Joe on our boards which help the boards to blow downwind after a good yard sale.

Becky also had a good day. She used my board, which since it is larger and has more surface area, it got her up quickly. She got several good water starts before finally catching an edge and getting dragged from the board. She was too far to retrieve it, and her one handed upwind body dragging was a bit rusty, so she brought herself in to shore and called it a day.

Afterwards we headed to a local little restaurant for dinner with a new friend, Brian, from Seattle. He took this picture of us at the table. I think you can see how tired I was, from the 3 hours of snorkeling and 2 hours of Kiteboarding, by the look on my face.  Yes, I slept good this night!

And that was it for the day.  I leave you with one last picture of the sky from Casa Verde as we started to walk to dinner.  It was a surreal purple tint that looked amazing with all the green foliage as natural accents.