Bahia Concepcion and Isla San Marcos

Tags: Bahia Concepcion, Baja, Isla San Marcos, Mexico, San Carlos, food, sailing

Date: May 22, 2024

After leaving Isla Carmen, we continued north and went into a large bay called Bahía de Concepción. We anchored in several small bays within the large bay. Here we hiked up the hill from Playa El Burro to a pass where we could look into the bay further north:

More views going up towards the pass:

Here we are looking north towards Posada Concepción where we sailed to some days later:

On the way down we saw a Baja California collared lizard that really wanted its photo taken:

The last place we stayed on the Baja-side of the Sea of Cortez this spring was at the island called Isla San Marcos. On the south tip of the island is a gypsum mine that was a major source of gypsum during the Second World War. It is still active though it is believed that it will be depleted within the next 10-15 years. We anchored on the west side of the island far from the mining area.

We went on a dinghy ride to the shore and took this picture of the funny-looking rocks:

Once we got closer to a narrow beach, where we planned to go ashore, we saw something very white sitting on a shelf on the red rocks:

We believe it to be a dolphin skull.

Bjarne went a bit uphill to explore further, while Félicie stayed on the beach looking for shells:

We found another skull, this time from a turtle:

At this time of our trip we were running a bit low on interesting food since it had been more than a month since we had last provisioned. So we were very happy when some local fishermen came over and offered to sell us some clams:

We bought a dozen of the fist-sized clams, called chocolate clams because of the the color of the shell. It was a bit of a challenge getting them opened but YouTube came to the rescue and Félicie also found a recipe for baked chocolate clams that she was able to make with the limited range of ingredients we had on the boat.

After anchoring off Isla San Marcos for several days, we left in the early morning to be able to make it to San Carlos on the mainland side of the sea before it got too late in the day. As we were rounding the northwest corner of the island, a huge pod of jumping dolphins turned up:

Here you can see how much they stir up the water by all the jumping around:

In this part of the sea we saw quite a few large fishing boats like this one:

We arrived in a bay a little ways from San Carlos in the late evening and the next day we sailed the last few miles to Marina San Carlos with a view of these dramatic rock formations on the way: