"I've got a bad feeling," my soul mate suddenly confided during our lunch.

She motioned toward two men approaching us on foot from up the beach.

"Boy, are we glad to see you," they declared, faces awash in the unmistakable smiles of los gringos.

Thus wrenched from our solitude, we listened as the plight of our unfortunate acquaintances spilled into our communion, intermingling in our digestive tracts with sardine sandwiches and warm beer. These two men and a buddy had left Cholla Bay in their cruiser the day before, proceeding some twenty miles northwest to a fishing ground brought to their attention by the locals. They had spent the day fishing and eating steaks, apparently brought along because of a revulsion to cleaning fish. Alas, when they turned their nimble craft homeward that evening they managed to make some twenty-five miles before running out of gasoline with no land in sight. Damning that empty can they'd brought along well into the night, they drifted on the tidal current until today, listening to the search planes on their brand-new marine transceiver and unable to respond due to a defective transmitter. Arriving on the afternoon tide about a mile north of us, they worked their cruiser securely onto the beach in mortal fear of loosing it to the persistent surf.

"How are your reserves?" I asked.

They declared five gallons of potable water and a few bags of potato chips. All we had to do was sell them ten gallons of gasoline and they'd be on their way.

"We don't have that much; maybe five gallons to spare at the most, and that's cutting it to the bone," I offered.

"Then you can drive us down the beach to Cholla Bay -- it couldn't take half an hour -- and bring us back with two or three cans of gasoline."

"It's not that easy," my soul mate tendered.

"Cholla Bay is just down the beach," one of the men repeated, "and we can't stay here. We have no way of getting home. If you don't help us we could die out here, and the search planes are still looking for us, and I'm afraid they'll give up, and then what will we do?" he spurted breathlessly.

"You must help us!" echoed his buddy. "We could die out here. We'll pay you."

The two began digging through their pockets, offering up all the cash in their possession. When we declined they recalculated, including an estimate of their buddy's wealth to grow the amount to something around $100.

"Put your money away; there are some things you don't understand," I started. "Would either of you like a cold beer?"

Both gratefully accepted. Their fixation on death seemed to guarantee there would be no listening to reason, but I had to try.

"Are you familiar with the tidal currents in the Cortez?"

"What currents?"

"Is this your first trip to Cholla Bay, then?" I pressed.

"Oh, no; we come here all the time," lied one of them.

"This is our twelfth trip to Cholla Bay," declared the other, pulling an obviously random number from the air.

I explained how the movement of water in a narrowing gulf created two 23-foot tides per day, which produced currents that can drag a boat hundreds of miles up or down the coast in a matter of hours.

"This is Boating 101 in the Cortez; even laymen like ourselves know all about it, and we've never set foot in a boat."

"When I put the anchor out yesterday, I don't think it touched bottom," the first one sheepishly volunteered.

They began shifting around like a couple of naughty children caught with their hands in a cookie jar.

"We'll be here through tomorrow, and then the next morning we'll be headed up the beach to El Golfo. It's only half the distance. We could probably take one of you and your gas cans to El Golfo."

They were already protesting loudly.

"We could refill your water bottle and give you some of our food," I continued. "You wouldn't have any trouble at all; there are fisherman up and down here all the time, but always from El Golfo. You could catch a ride back here with fisherman and head out for home. It's that simple!"

They weren't buying it.

"There's a great shallow bay behind us," I explained, "Bahia de Adair -- and you have to go around it to get to Cholla Bay."

I proposed a ride down the beach to make my point. They wanted to get their buddy, but I insisted it would only take a few minutes and would be highly instructional. Our secret hope was that we would find the fishermen who passed in the early morning and somehow get ourselves off the figurative crab-gig.

The ride went a long way toward momentarily relieving us of the layer of perspiration we had build up on our skin that afternoon in the sweltering heat, despite the ever-increasing wind. We drove the one kilometer to the point, where our charges quickly grasped the immensity of Bahia de Adair and abandoned all hope of an early resolution to their dilemma. We saw no one and were back in fifteen minutes.

"So you see, I began again, you can't really get there from here. It's a minimum five-hour trip one-way, over seventy miles through deep sand; and we're headed toward El Golfo, the opposite direction. It's a lot closer. We might not even have enough gas to get back to Cholla Bay if we wanted to."

"You can't leave us; it would be murder!"

Their fear was becoming irrational.

"Hey, enough with the melodrama." I was loosing patience. "You've got five gallons of water plus food, and there are fishermen through here every day. The search planes will be back any time, and you know as well as I do that they won't give up until they've scoured every inch of the coastline. You're not going to die; you're not even going to run out of water. But, your boat isn't going anywhere for two weeks, because you dragged it in at the top of the highest tide of the month. Hell, you may not get it out for a month."

The impact of this new disclosure reflected in horror on their faces.

"I don't believe that; I can't leave my boat here!" countered gringo number one as if his resolve would somehow overcome the force of the tide.

At this point my soul mate, who was becoming quite exasperated with these greenhorns, produced the tide calendar with almost hidden glee and explained the facts. The look on Captain Gringo’s face gave him away; this chauvinist did not at all like being given such humiliating information by anyone, let alone a woman.

"I can't leave it here! I've got $33,000 in that boat!"

"You have no choice; the water won't come close to it tomorrow."

What he didn't seem to grasp was that there was no danger whatsoever of loosing his boat. No self-respecting local fisherman would want a two-ton gas-guzzling cruiser that couldn't be maneuvered in the sand by two men.

"Look at these tides," I counseled, pointing at the calendar again. "All you have to do is come back in two weeks at 3:00 PM and it'll be afloat in an hour. If you're late or if you can't break it loose, come back a month later, August 16, and you've got it made for sure. The tide will be a foot higher then."

The desperate, wild-eyed looks the two exchanged belied a fear that was exceeded only by their naiveté.

"Why don't you guys give us some breathing room here so my wife and I can discuss our options in private," I suggested. "We'll drive up there in a little while and we can all discuss this thing together. It's too late to do anything until morning, anyway."

After the pair left, my soul mate proposed a drive back to the Federale outpost where the road meets the tracks, to see if they had a radio that could be used to contact the Port Authority at Puerto Peñasco. That was a good idea; if they contacted the Port Authority, these men wouldn't be our problem anymore. Besides, the trip would give us some measure of relief from the sweltering afternoon heat and maximum humidity. It would also be nice to have a valid reason to escape the sting of blowing sand by spending some additional time in the jeep. (There’s principle involved here: As experienced campers, we are always loath to simply caving in to the urge to escape the elements by cowering in our vehicle.) We checked our gasoline reserves and decided we would have enough to do that.

By now it was getting late in the afternoon, so we jumped into our jeep without further delay and drove the 1.5 km to where the unfortunate trio had constructed a windbreak on the beach near their leaning vessel.

We first attempted to clarify that we were not able or willing to take them all the way back to Cholla Bay, but would happily deliver them to El Golfo or Yuma. Certainly, we'd see they had a way of being found. After that, it was up to them. With limited seating space in our vehicle, Captain Gringo would come with us and the other two would stay behind.

 
Copyright (c) 1996-2010
Larry K. Fox

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