The Sea of Cortez

Earlier on this blog I wrote about a remarkable field biology course I took as an undergraduate student at UC Santa Cruz where we spent half of the academic term in the northern Gulf of California. Two items lately have moved my mind back to the Gulf.

The first is that I just finished reading John Steinbeck and Ed Rickett’s account of their 1940 expedition from Monterey, California to the Gulf (a long, subtropical sea also known as the Sea of Cortez) with a small crew aboard the Western Flyer. This book was in fact either assigned or optional reading during my UCSC course but I confess that I probably read little, if any, of the book back then.

The route taken by Ricketts and Steinbeck on
the Western Flyer to the Gulf of California.
Image in public domain. Source

Over the course of a six week journey, the biologist Ricketts and his famous writer-friend Steinbeck traveled down the Pacific side of the Baja California Peninsula and northward into the Gulf where they hopped nearly daily from location to location collecting invertebrates during low tide. In addition to describing the fauna they observed, collected, and sometimes aggressively hunted (there is seldom mention of the marine flora, except such brief notes that the mangroves stank), they otherwise pontificate on the science, philosophy, the idiosyncrasies of human nature, and insights gained from various peoples they encountered during their travels.

The second point of convergence is the development of my recent interest in film photography, principally medium format film (but more on that later), which has branched out in a few directions. One trap of the new interest, into which I am not alone in succumbing, is the purchase of more cameras than I probably need, but one of these purchases is at least partly nostalgic as well as functional – a nice specimen of an underwater Nikonos III camera.

The Nikonos series of underwater cameras originated in a collaboration between Jacques Cousteau and a French camera maker. It was called the Calypso originally. The well-known camera manufacturer, Nikon, picked up production of this 35-mm film camera and it became the premier underwater camera line for quite some time. My first use of an underwater camera was in fact a Nikonos camera, also at the time I was a student at UCSC. I shot my first roll or two of underwater film on kelp forest dives in the Monterey area, but as students were also able to use some of these university-owned cameras during our field course in the Gulf of California.

I still have nearly three dozen of the underwater photos I shot in the Sea of Cortez, preserved as color slides. Though not of notable quality, they generally came out better than the surviving slides I first took underwater in Monterey. The Gulf photos show the vibrancy of the marine organisms of the Gulf. Like Ricketts, I was pretty interested in marine invertebrates at the time, and I often aimed the camera on colorful benthic invertebrates of this warm sea.

Various benthic invertebrates from the northern Sea of Cortez. Original: 35mm film, Nikonos camera.

After over a month of collecting, Steinbeck and Ricketts returned up the Pacific coast of Baja back to the central California coast where the Western Flyer would end that chapter of its career as a floating invertebrate laboratory. This boat would go on to fulfill several careers as a fishing and surveying vessel in the North Pacific under a long list of owners, fall into disrepair, and even sink on several occasions in Washington state. In a very interesting story, however, the Western Flyer is on track to return to the service of marine science. After near death, a non-profit group has recently purchased the boat, is exhaustively repairing it in Port Townsend, and plans to return the boat to Monterey and re-trace the 1940 journey by Steinbeck and Ricketts in the year 2022. That year would mark 24 years since I have been to the Gulf; and how fun it would be to arrange a trip to Mexico to see the Western Flyer back in the Sea of Cortez!

The brown alga Padina (Dictyotales).