Isla Partida and Bahia El Pescador

Tags: Bahia El Pescador, Bahia Los Angeles, Isla Partida, Mexico, sailing

Date: May 19, 2025

From Bahia San Francisquito we sailed about 30 nautical miles to the small Isla Partida. It is uninhabited but lots of birds live there. We arrived in the afternoon, anchored in a bay and took the dinghy ashore to explore. Among the rocks at the water's edge we found a few oyster catchers:

They're hard to see in the image above, but have a bright red beak and in real life there is a lot of high pitched shrieking involved whenever oyster catchers are around, so that makes it easier to spot them.

It was a bit awkward walking on the round rocks but we made it up to the top of a low ridge separating the two high ends of the island so we could look out over the other side. Below we are looking back towards the bay we anchored in:

As we were getting closer to the ridge we noticed that there was a constant humming and shrieking tone in the air and it turned out it was coming from the small islet that we could see from the ridge:

That small islet is one large bird colony and the constant hum was coming from thousands of birds living and nesting there, among them many terns.

When we turned around and looked back into the bay where we had anchored, we could see the bird-poop covered cliffs next to the entrance of the bay:

Lots of gulls flying over the bay:

More gulls in the air and in the water:

The constant hum from the bird colony continued all night. The next day we decided to leave the birds in peace and go back towards the Baja coast. We left in the morning as the fog rolled over Isla Partida:

Our next anchorage was in Bahia Pescador and we stayed there almost a week. Other boats came and went and we all had drinks together one evening on one of the boats.

We went ashore for a short hike across the island to look out on the beach at the other side and found these things rolling in the waves:

They are seahares or Aplysia california, huge sea slugs that can grow up 60 cm long. The ones we saw were around 25-30 cm.

Looking back over the beach where we found the slugs:

Back to the other side of the island with Amanda anchored in the background:

Finally we moved onwards, to the north. We stopped for a couple of hours in Bahia Los Angeles, that has a small village and a few shops so we could buy meat and fresh vegetables.

As soon as we were back on board we hoisted the anchor and sailed a little further on.