A
t the end of a six-mile dirt
track in lower Baja on the
sun-dappled Sea of Cortez,
a hand-painted cutout of a
whale shark hangs on a cattle fence near
a welcome sign for Cabo Pulmo. The sign
reads “Santuario de mar, tierra y gente
— Sanctuary of sea, earth and people,” a
low-key introduction to one of the world’s
most productive marine parks.
In the waters just off the small desert
village of some 200 locals and owners
of solar-powered second homes, you
can find mobs of sea lions, swarms of
yellow- and bluestriped grunts with big,
luminescent golden groupers swimming
through their ranks along with huge
turquoise, blue, green and orange
parrotfish, tiger and bull sharks, shoals
of bigeye silver jacks and squadrons of
leaping mobula rays that — photographed
airborne against the sere desert hills —
have become the symbol of Cabo Pulmo’s
28-square-mile national marine park. In
different seasons the park also attracts
whale sharks, humpback whales and nesting sea turtles.
Although the water temperature was cool and the
visibility little better than 20 feet during the oven-
baked July days when I did my back rolls off small,
beach-launched panga dive boats, it felt great to drop
into the salty wilderness amid an abundance of frisky
fish and healthy corals. There were spur-and-groove
canyons full of fan, cup and stony corals, green moray
eels and garden eels that swayed like prairie grass on
the sandy flats. A big 8-foot stingray lay half buried in
the sand, while porcupine pufferfish and yellow-tailed
gray sturgeon grazed the corals. Humphead parrotfish
chewed coral and pooted sand, a major source of
replenishment for those tropical white-sand beaches
Cabo
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WINTER 2014
P U L M O
B Y D A V I D H E L V A R G
Sea, e rth and people
Thousands of jacks school together in Cabo Pulmo National
Marine Park, Baja California Sur, Mexico.
