Slow Baja - Travel Talk Steve Hayward From Paddling South Outfitters On Exploring The Gulf Of California

Episode Date: February 12, 2021

In today’s Travel Talk with Slow Baja, we sit down with guide and outfitter Steve Hayward of Paddling South in Loreto, Baja California Sur. Hayward has traveled extensively and has paddled in Chile, Alaska, Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Ireland, Wales, BC, and Baja. He has guided and developed programs for Sea Trek for over 25 years. For the last 15 years, he’s run the Baja operation in Loreto -a beautiful and historic town with the coveted Pueblo Mágico designation. With the advent of SUP, Steve has focused on developing exciting inter-island adventures on paddleboards, utilizing Sea Treks’ traditional kayaking routes in Baja. He’s committed to “downwind” paddling during the “El Norte” blows -that occur in the mid-winter on the Sea of Cortez. He enjoys free diving and sharing the unforgettable desert and marine environment of this unique part of Mexico. In this rambling conversation, Steve takes a deep dive into why you need to get down to Loreto and let Paddling South get you out on the water! Visit Paddling South Visit Paddling South on Facebook Follow Paddling South on Instagram

Hey, this is Michael Emery. Thanks for tuning into the Slow Baja. This podcast is powered by Tequila Fortaleza, handmade in small batches, and hands down, my favorite tequila. Slow Baja is brought to you by the Nora Mexican 1000. Do you have a 4x4? Do you want to see off-road racing up close and personal, join Slow Baja on the Savvy Safari 4x

class led by off-road racing legend Kurt LaDuke. The Savvy Safari class is a great way to experience the happiest race on earth. For more information, check out www.w Nora.com. That's www. N-O-R-R-A.com. Steve Hayward, delighted to be out in Sausalito today. Travel Talk with Slow Baja. We've had a fantastic paddle board.

sitting outside on a beautiful day. Sun is shining, 70 degrees, the water's flat. And we're going to talk about Sea Trek and paddling south for those of you on the internet. And what Steve does in Baja. So take it away, Steve. Tell me about how you got down to Baja and started leading kayaking and stand-up paddleboarding tours. Oh, I'm sure it's an interesting story. Anyone who's ever found Baja, I'm sure they have an interesting.

story for it, but probably important to say that like a lot of kids, my age, I'm 61 as of yesterday. As a child, I thought I was going to be an oceanographer. We all grew up with Jacques Cousteau and National Geographic, and our biggest attractions were books like Contiki and Ocean Adventures and things like that. So like so many kids, I just was fascinated with Ocean. I had a great fortune to live on many different beaches as a kid. My dad moved us around a lot, but he always made sure we lived on a beach. And so, you know, I just knew growing up I was going to be an oceanographer. Fast forward, last couple years of junior high, high school, college, we were planted in the inland in Texas. And when I went to college, forestry was an option, but oceanography was not where I went to school.

and kind of dropped that and kind of went on about life, but had always been a fish nut, an ocean nut, anything marine-related has been a passion and a fascination for me. And so as a traveler, you know, after college, various jobs and leaving jobs and going back to jobs, I traveled quite a bit. I was a fanatic climber for many years, and I spent about five years down, in Chile in the winters climbing and really loving the ocean side of things down there as well. I met my wife in southern Chile and she is Dutch.

We came up to California where I had a boat that I would live on in the summers and we worked for a couple summers up here and then we'd go back down to Chile in the winter and Rome and bang around the mountains some more. And she had traveled a lot. When I met her, she'd already been in 53 different countries. And she always used to say that India was the most fascinating of all of them. It was so diverse and so rich. And when we came back to California one year, I said, well, you know, I know that I'm sure that India is amazing.

I know that it is, although I haven't been there. But I want to show you someplace that I think is going to give it a run for its money. And I had had the good fortune of spending a lot of time in Mexico as a kid. My dad loved Mexico and would trump us down there every chance we got. Small planes, station wagons, you name it. Coastlines, deserts. And I think anyone who knows Mexico can appreciate that it's probably hard to find many countries in the world that could be as diverse, as rich as Mexico when you put it all together,

when you look at every different state and all the different things it has to offer. And I just look forward to showing that to her and really kind of blubes. lowering our way with it. So one year, we decided not to go to, uh, back down to Chile, we bought an old Mercedes 240D because a diesel mechanic buddy of mine said, you know, these things will turn to powder before they'll leave you on the side of the road. So that's what you want. And we bought it and we drove to Texas, said hi to my family, turn around, across the border at Nuevo Laredo and spent the next five months driving around mainland Mexico. And if you spend four and a half, five months driving around mainland Mexico, you're going to see a lot.

of amazing, amazing places. You're going to have a lot of amazing experiences. This was 93, and you wouldn't think twice about doing that back then. And she eventually had to admit and give me that, yes, this is an incredibly, incredibly rich, diverse, and stunningly beautiful country. And I was glad to hear that. Well, I had never been to Baja. We lived out here in northern California, the Bay Area at that time. in the summers and the last month of the road trip involved driving up to Mazatlan and you could

take a ferry from Mazatlan to La Paz. And so, you know, doing my research, I knew, well, Baja sounds pretty cool and it's the way to get back to Southern California and wrap up this trip. So we'll wrap it up that way. And we put the car on the ferry and drove to put the car on ferry and took off and you leave late in the afternoon, you're traveling most of the night, and you come into La Paz at sunrise. I didn't mention it, but the other big passion of mine were the southern deserts of the United States, Utah, Arizona, Canyonlands, that whole area in New Mexico. And so someone like me who is just enthralled with southwest deserts and all things marine-related and ocean-related. If you're standing on the deck of a ferry at sunrise

and you're pulling into La Paz, you have died and gone to heaven. There's no question about it. And any of you who have, I imagine many of you listening, know exactly what I'm talking about. If the sunsets are some of the best in the world, the sunrises are as well. And all of a sudden, I'm looking at the Sonoran Desert. I'm looking at the best mountains I ever hung out in in Arizona, plunging into this, you know, crystal clear, gorgeous, gorgeous body of water. And maybe they were, maybe they weren't, but maybe there were dolphins splashing around and whales spouting and all sorts of crazy creatures popping out of the water. Sooner or later they were.

And that's what I found pretty quickly once we got off the ferry and started exploring. And we spent the next month kind of romping around the southern Baja Peninsula. And the rest is history. That was 27 years ago. have not missed a year yet. Went back every year. These days, I'm there approximately six months a year. 15 years ago, I said to myself, if I could have a lifestyle that

involves six months a year in Northern California and six months a year in Mexico, especially in southern Baja, it could be no finer. And probably about five years ago, I hit that. I've been running sea kayaking programs down in Southern Baja for close to 20 years. guiding at first, but managing for probably 15 of those years. I apparently am a better manager than I am a guide. Unfortunately, I found that out after only five years of guiding.

So I've been running sea kayak programs down there, and Sea Trek and now paddling South have both been running sea kayak programs down in Baja for 30 plus years. And I sort of inherited the Sea Trek Baja program with my passion for Baja and all of the way of the wayfinding and all things Mexican. About 20 years ago, I started taking over those programs. And about six years ago, we had the opportunity

to purchase the sales side of Paddling South, which is a wonderful company that Trudy Angel, and many of you will know her, started 30 plus years ago down there. And their trips were different than the Sea Trek trips, so it was a nice complimentary purchase for us, and it just enabled me to spend and even more time down in Mexico.

Well, I'm going to let you take a breath. That was a great introduction. Tell me a little bit about the difference between those two. So we talked about it on our stand-up paddle this morning, the kind of trips that Sea Trek had traditionally run, and the kind of trips that Trudy had traditionally run, and why the two serve maybe different audiences, but why they're both super ways to do what you're doing.

So take us through a typical your options. Let's put it that way. Take us through the options. Sure, yeah. Well, let me flip it this way. Trudy was the first one down there really running commercial trips, I believe. And that was in the late 70s. And then Bob Legg, who started Sea Trek and is now run by his son Galen, probably started in 82. And Trudy's trips and Bob's in the early years, they were all classic sea kayak expeditions.

All any of us knew to do was to get a sea kayak, stuff it full of rice and beans and some beer. and some water and off we went and explored. And Trudy's trips to this day are classic sea kayak expedition style is the term that we use, that's the term that's recognized in the industry. There are trips where you show up in Loretto and we've got everything sort of ready, but we're basically gonna meet at the beach next morning

after an orientation and we're gonna load everything we have in the kayaks and away we go. And we may have a predetermined route, But we're offered a lot of flexibility if weather conditions are such that where we thought we were going to go doesn't make sense. We can, you know, head south, head north, and pick another beach or another cove. And when we get there, we just pull the boats up on the beach and there we are. Sea Trek trips from the very earliest days, Darrell Bestflug and his partner down there at the, at that time, they were using an inflatable as a support boat.

To a larger re because Darrow liked to spear fish and provide fish for the trips and he'd use that to get a little further out. He had a yacht, he kept in Puerto Escondito, and so he had his zodiac down there. But it enabled them to carry an ice chest, which meant ice, which meant a little more diversity in terms of food and beer, cold beer, all week long. It goes without saying that that's a big part of the Ba experience. for many. And so from the earliest days, pretty early on, we started inviting the guests to

really put everything they had in the punga, and we would throw mask, fin, snorkels, and a little day bag in the boat with us, and off we go. So real light kayaks, not a lot of time spent on your knees packing and unpacking. And you get to camp and the kitchen set up, and a lot of things already prepared for you. So a little bit more luxurious trip, if you will, maybe a trip that was a little bit easier on the lower back in some respects, not moving heavy kayaks up and down the beach. And, you know, there's a few drawbacks. There's certain places we can't stay if the wind's blowing because we've got to anchor the boat every day on an open roadstead. That doesn't really work. So we need protected coves and beaches. But for the most part, people have the ability to choose

whether they want a trip that's self-contained, a lot of flexibility in terms of where you go. People that have never done a boat-supported trip, they'll oftentimes imagine that there's this motorboat around all week long. Really nothing could be farther from the truth. The boat disappears in the morning. You don't see it until the end of the day. It's anchored in front of camp.

It is available and handy for going out and getting up closer to super pods dolphins or whale sightings and things like that. And, you know, again, there's the cold beer. Those on those trip don't complain. But that's the big difference, really, between a sea trade trip and a paddling south trip. And tell me a little bit about the terrain or the opportunities to go north, go south, out to the islands. Tell me a little bit about that. Sure, sure.

People that know sea kayaking in Baja know that most of the sea kayaking that Baja happens in Baja happens more or less from Muley South to Lepad. along that stretch of the Gulf of California or the Securtez, if you will. People have paddled up in Bahia to Los Angeles. The whole peninsula has been paddled and explored. But the great majority of the commercial trips that happen and private trips that happen generally happen somewhere between Mulejah and La Paz. A lot of that has to do with the richness of the coastline there. There's lots of protected spots.

or when the wind starts blowing, there's accessible islands, and you can fly into Laredo, and you can fly into Lepaz, and you can fly into Cabo and get to Lepaz pretty quickly. We run trips anywhere from Mulehaye down to Loretto, Loretto down to Lepaz, and lots of trips just out in front of Loretto in the National Marine Park, Park Nacional Bahia Loretto. The islands out in front of Loretto,

there's five islands out there, and they're all within one of the few national marine parks that exist in Mexico. It's truly a jewel. But you can do amazing trips from Mulehe out of Bahia Conception down the coast to Loretto with stunning coves, fantastic beaches, side canyon and arroyo hikes, hot springs, and that stretch. Loretto, a lot of popularity in paddling out to the islands and spending seven days. with two days, three days on Danzante and two or three days on Isla Carmen and back across, maybe doing a 10-day circumnavigation of Isla Carmen,

spend some time visiting the old salt mine there, which is truly a story in and of itself, fascinating, fascinating history there. And then paddling from Loretto south to La Paz is considered, I think anybody who's been in the kayaking world and around the kayaking world, And I mean the world would put that in one of the top five trips that you can do anywhere. It's just a truly stunning trip that involves beautiful coves, small islands, small itinerant fish camps, remote, remote fishing villages that people have lived for 100 years but live there year-round.

And the only way we can get there is via boat. Ranchers up in the hills that are sort of the salt of the earth and the people that we really love to visit as we go down the coast. and just remote and stunning beaches to explore. Can you talk a little bit about, sorry, we're here in a working waterfront in Sausalito. We've got some construction noises going on as we're recording here. Steve, tell us a little bit about maybe people are not that aware, hopefully on Slow Baja. They love Baja already, but maybe some people aren't that aware of Loretto versus La Paz. Can you talk a little bit about Loretto, which I think is just a small.

a stunning little gem of a city, obviously a Pueblo magical city, but can you tell me a little bit about your thoughts on it? You've been up and down the peninsula. Sure, yeah. It is a gem and a real find. Loretto is, you know, she was originally just a small fishing town. I had the good fortune to live for 12 years with one of the original fishing families there over in the Colonies, Aragosa. and for, you know, 100-something years, Loretta's been around for 300 years. It's the original site of the whole chain of California missions that many of us know, up and down the coast of California and Baja. Loretto was the first mission that stuck.

When the Jesuits came over and started trying to institute this series of missions, Loretto was the first one that actually stuck. There were several others in the Loretto area. San Bruno down south near Ligui that they tried to make happen and didn't. Loretto has always been there. So she's a 300-year-old town, and for 260-some-odd years of that existence, basically fishing was what people did there. In the late 70s, when Mexico decided that they could get into tourism,

that tourism made sense economically, they created Faunateur, which is the tourism board. And we joke, they threw darts at a map, but they basically picked about seven spots along the coastlines of Mexico that they determined would be good locations for mega resort-type places. And some of those had been around for Al-Acapulco had been popular for 450 years. Mazatlan, of course, had been around forever and was well-known throughout the past 60, 70, 80 years for sport fishing.

but they also identified places like Puerto Vallarta, Zatayo Zawata Neo, and Cabo San Lucas, they determined that that would be a good spot, Cancun. And Loretto was on that short list in the early days, and they came in and put airstrips in all these places, and then history sort of went on. The tourism board essentially never came back to Loretto after they put the full-size air strip in,

And so we've been blessed with the ability to get full-sized planes into Loretto. Just not very often. No, the accessibility has come and gone and is always challenging. But as we mentioned earlier, that might have a lot to do with why Loretto is still the gem that she is. She's never really exploded. Loretto really is a beautiful, beautiful place. Yeah. Here at Slow Baja, we can't wait to drive our old land cruisers out of the border.

When we go, we'll be going with Baja bound insurance. The website's fast and easy to use, check them out at Bajabound.com. That's Bajaubound.com, serving Mexico travelers since 1994. Why should somebody come to Loretto and go kayaking with you, and how are they going to get there, which airlines, where do they fly from? So take us through that. Okay. Well, the first thing about Loretto is people that know Baja know Cabo San Lucas and it's famous for his nightlife and people know. La Paz as sort of a international destination with a lot of vitality.

Loretto is considered the town along the Baja coast that people go to to get up in the morning, have a great traditional Mexican breakfast, get up in the mountains, or get underwater or get on top of the water, play hard, come back to town, have a great meal, have a margarita or two, and by 9 o'clock, you're asleep. There is no nightlife whatsoever. Mike's bar. I think maybe that's the only place open after 10 o'clock. And it will be open pretty late into the night, but that's it.

It's not a nightlife town. It's a very quiet, very small, friendly place. There's probably five families in the entire town. Everybody is related. Everybody looks after each other. I've raised two kids that are in their mid-20s now with yearly trips down there. And from the time they were six years old, I could let them wander around town freely and know that there was never going to be a...

danger or an issue. It's a wonderful place to start to get to know Mexico if you don't know Mexico. If you do know Mexico, you'll really appreciate sort of the lack of time share people, the lack of pushiness, the lack of people trying to sell you things. There's no hotels over three stories in the town. There's great restaurants. You know, we live here in Sausalito Mill Valley and sort of a foodie spot and I dare say there. there's way better selection of restaurants and food in Loretto than there is in this area. It's amazing. So it's kind of evolved into a bit of a boutique ecotourist town, if you will.

And again, the things that people do here, they do sport fishing, lots of diving, lots of snorkeling, lots of hiking, lots of kayaking. And these days, lots of paddleboarding. And people appreciate that sort of go hard at it during the day, rest up again, refuel, and come back out the next day. for some more great activity. We get there primarily through LAX on Alaska. That's how the bulk of the people get there, if you're coming from this side of the country. American Airlines is just for the first time

start offering a flight from Dallas, which I believe connects in Phoenix, and then goes into Loretto. WestJet, a Canadian airline about five, six, seven years ago, started flying out of Ontario. And we have, like many places, We have a high contingent of people from Canada that come down and spend the winter with us. And they're so nice. Yeah.

And that Westjet flight has been a real boom because, quite frankly, it freed up a lot of space on the Alaska flight. And people who go to Loretto every year know that sometimes it can be a real challenge finding a seat to get down there. And with the advent of the Westjet flight that allowed the Canadians to kind of skip over from Vancouver where they came from right to Ontario, get on a plane, fly right into Loretto twice a week for most of the years that they've been flying down there, the off seasons, once a week. And then people will these days use the CBX cross-border bridge out of San Diego, which is a very unique scenario. There's only one other place in the world like it that you could literally walk across an

international border simply by having a plane ticket out of the airport that's on the other side of that bridge. And that basically involves flying to San Diego or getting to San Diego, showing up on the American side of a beautiful modern bridge tunnel, if you will. And as long as you have a ticket to fly out that same day out of Tijuana Airport, which is a gorgeous little airport, modern, pretty slick, you're allowed to walk across that tunnel and check in for your flight and fly away. And for many, many years, those of us that flew out of Tijuana Airport would cross the border with the other 8 million people a day that crossed the border at Tijuana.

I think it's the most heavily traveled border in the world on a daily basis. You know, when we're younger, we throw our backpack on and trek across with the rest of humanity. And that was exciting and fun, but it's not for everybody. And these days, you can take the CBX and get a flight on Arrow Calafia, and you're in Loretto an hour and 20 minutes later. Yeah, it's quite an easy deal for those in Southern California or flying into San Diego, hopping an Uber, or even take the trolley down there now and take that bridge.

That's, that's, it's fun traveling. So is your, most of your trips based around that two flights a week then? I mean, are you offering, you know, seven day packages traditionally? Or tell me, let's back that up a little bit. Tell me what the offerings are. Yeah. So the traditional or the common sea kayaking package these days will usually be about six days out on the water, five nights, six days. And that fits in nicely to a Saturday fly-in, Saturday fly-out, or a Saturday-fly-in, Sunday fly-out.

You know, the great experience is to come down with a day or two at least on either end of your trip and really take advantage of some quiet time in Loretto because it is, as I said, it's a dream to be wandering around a soft, wonderful, warm, welcoming village like Loretto, and it feels like a village after you've been there for a bit. and just get that soft hit of Mexican culture and enjoy the food and enjoy the people and slow down a little bit. We do run lots of shorter custom trips, three or four day trips. And again, those folks tend to spend at least a week, but I suppose there are some that will fly in, do the trip, fly back out. And then we do run a lot of 10-day trips, and those trips will typically be the trips where we're ending up down in La Paz.

and so folks might fly into Loretto and have an exit flight out of San Jose Del Cabo. And so we'll spend 10 days paddling down, 10 or 12 days paddling down to La Paz. And you finish the trip in La Paz. La Paz is a wonderful place to have some time. The Malacon there is just a real, real, real treat to wander at sunrise or sunset. Great food, lots of entertainment. And then the next morning you get up an hour and 45 minutes later, you're at San Jose de Calbo Airport. can fly out easily from there.

Those of you who've been going to Baja a long time and fishing or traveling down there, you know that we all used to be able to fly in and out of La Paz from the United States. It's probably been, I'm guessing, 10, 12, 15 years since we've had an international flight into La Paz, which is the capital of Baja, California, Sur. So that's been really unusual. They are now starting to have flights from outside the country into La Paz now. So I suppose some people are going to be able to start to fly. in and out of La Paz from the states.

But that hasn't been possible for quite a while. So most folks who began a trip or ended a trip in La Paz would leave from San Jose del Cabo. Cheap flights to San Jose del Cabo, direct flights from a lot of places, so it's pretty convenient. And the stretch of real estate between San Jose del Cabo and La Paz can be very interesting to check out as well.

Yeah, I like that area a lot. I'll be driving down there next week. Steve, best place to find out more information about C-Trek and what you're doing. Well, C-T-T-T-R-E-K.com. And when you come to that site, our Baja programs are on there, our paddling South Baja programs are on there as well. Ask for me, Steve, and I'll be happy to start communicating with you about it. Yeah, I can attest you're on the spot, you know. As soon as we got connected, you've been on the spot.

And then what time of year are you there? You said six months there, six months here. When's the season? The traditional paddling season in this part of Baja really starts about mid-October for most people. And mid-October, on the average, you're going to expect to have daytime temperatures in the low-to-mid-90s. It can be hotter, and that's not for everybody. But mid-October, water temperatures are delicious, you know, in the mid-to-high 80s. And so it's just a dream to be underwater.

We'll start mid-October. We finish up sort of the end of April to mid-May. By mid-May, the temperatures start to creep up there again as well to the point where paddling, exercising in those kind of temperatures is just not for everybody. And if I have somebody, the family from Arizona calls me and says, hey, we want to go down at the end of May, let's do it. Here we go, because they're comfortable with that. But if someone's calling from Oregon or Northern California,

Yeah, I'm going to say end of October to middle of April is your window. Beyond that, you might want to come down and acclimatize a little bit. Right, right, right. And then what I love about Loretto is Fourth of July. It's just the only people in town are fishermen. It's hot and they're out there for Dorado and that's a lovely time of year to be there too. Yeah, I mean, it's a lovely time to be in Loretto anytime. Yeah, it is.

And can you tell people a little bit about it? They may not understand the kind of water that you're paddling on there. So you're on a bay. It's a long bay. Yes. Right in front of Loretto, technically, it's a bay. The Gulf of California is basically, you know, a 600-mile-long body of water that is sort of northeast to southwest pointing. And it's riddled with islands and coves and channels and deep trenches, you know,

Some parts of the Sea of Cortez are the second deepest part of the second deepest body of water in the world. So where we're paddling, you know, you're thinking clear water in the summer, crystal clear, might be 60, 70, 80, 90 feet of visibility in the summer. Winter months when it's windy and it is windy and it's something to talk about. You have a lot of upwelling and that generates a lot of food in the water. The water turns a little bit darker. That food brings the whales in, which we're very well known for, and Loretta has become quite the destination for whale watching, both on the Pacific side with the migrating Pacific grays and as well hump back some blue whales in January, February, March.

But the water visibility goes down a little bit in the colder, windier winter months, which I would say are basically November through February. You're going to have wind a certain amount of days. water temperatures are down as well. We snorkely year round down there, but you can bet that by December 1st, typically until early April, you're going to wear a shorthy wetsuit to be comfortable.

And, you know, just anytime you're underwater, there might be 300 different species of tropical fish below. I think the thing that, if someone asked me to say, what is the most special part about being down there year after year after year? Again, you know, my affinity for all things fishy, it's the creatures that you're going to see in the Sea of Cortez.

And when you're out on the water six days straight, you're going to see a lot, and you're going to see things that you could never possibly imagine. And the stories that I could tell you about sort of the unique and special things that we've seen on a day-to-day basis down there are never-ending. There's a diver that I met who had been diving down there for 40 years. And I told him, I said, you know, I've been underwater for 20 years now.

And every single time I'm underwater, I see something I haven't seen before. He said, Steve, I've been doing this for 40 years and I still see new things. So it's beautiful water. And there is always something, plopping, flopping, flipping, jumping, jumping, leaping, breaching, spouting, everywhere, day and night. And for me, having been fortunate enough to have seen a lot of different bodies of water in my life, a lot of different

bodies of water in this planet, the accessibility of marine life in the Sea of Cortez is significantly higher than anywhere else I've ever been. Now, you can go underwater in some pretty cool places and see a lot of neat stuff, but the Sea of Cortez will throw things at you that you just never imagine seeing.

Strange things. interesting, fascinating things. And so I just really want to emphasize that it's not just a pretty body of water with these stunning, stunning, gorgeous desert mountains plunging into it, but it's an unforgettable body of water with the Sonoran Desert plunging into it, which is a unique combination in and of itself. You know, hillsides covered in, you know, I'm 30-foot-tall cactus plunging into a crystal-clear reservoir, and the minute you get near the water, you're just seeing more marine life than you could ever possibly imagine.

Yeah. It's important to know that that's part of what's going to happen to you when you're down there. That's what I was hoping you're going to get to, because that's the why you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some of the things we've seen just, you know, I can mention a couple of them really quickly, but you know, you know, you know, never imagine them. Well, it's something that, again, it is, I think that your enthusiasm says it all. I mean, you didn't have to name the 300 species that you're going to see, but you're going to see from sea turtles. It's Jacques Cousteau every night on TV. If you saw that like I did in my childhood,

it's unending. It's that. You're seeing it. Yeah. Let's close it by talking a little bit about the people. We talked a little bit about that on our paddle board, the people that work with you, work for you, the people that you lived with when you first came down. You know, a lot of people might be put off by, hey, Mexico, it's, you know, whatever. How can you describe the people? Yeah. The people in this part of Mexico are, they're special. I mean, you want to know a little bit about the history.

The Baja Peninsula for many, many years, up until, you know, I'm not a history expert. I'm a history buff, but I think it was, you know, somewhere in the 50s before they were more than just territories of Mexico. They weren't official states. A lot of people in the world thought that Baja California, which is the northern state from Tijuana down to Garado Negro, and Baja California's sewer were part of California because they had California in the name and because Mexico didn't really recognize them much. It was raw desert, wasn't a lot of water, they thought. In fact, there's quite a bit of water in the Bahá Peninsula. We do have droughts, and we're in one right now, but there's a lot of subsurface water there.

And it didn't look like the kind of place you could easily live. And Mexico kind of sort of the red-headed stepchild, basically, of their states. And not many people live there. Eventually, Mexico decided to try and start populating it. And in fact, in the 70s, they basically went to people in places like Michoacan and Chiapas and said, we'll give you land if you basically make it work. And if you know anything about Michelle Khan or Chiapas, you know that there are people who could have only dreamt of that and never thought they could realize it. So many people made their way quickly to Baja in the 70s, and I know a lot of these families.

And one can only imagine if you're leaving the jungle of Chiapas where there's water and everything grows like crazy, and you show up in this dry Sonoran desert, It was a real eye-opener. And many people didn't make it, but many people did. And they made it without the help of the government. The government gave them the land to a large degree, but I don't believe they helped them much more than that. And so you have a real self-sufficient, real independent type of person.

They stand on their own two feet. They're honest. They're hardworking. They're welcoming. there's not a lot of families in these smaller towns. And Mulahan Loretta, like I said, we kind of figure there's five families and everybody's related. And that sort of does something to a small community. Everybody's sort of held accountable because, you know, to certain degree, you know everybody,

you know their secrets, you know their mom, you know their dad, they know you. And having been down there for a long time, you really feel that over time and that they take care of each other. look after each other, as the cultures want to do. But they take care of people come down there as well. It's a really, well, you know this from your driving up and down the peninsula, sort of the ethic in Baja was always, you'd never drive past somebody broken down the side of the road. No one has ever been broken down the side of the road for more than one car in Baja.

That was sort of the ethic. And that's how the people are down there. So lovely people, not pushy. The people in southern Baja as well, I want to say, they're pretty well off, to be perfectly honest, compared to a lot of the people in the rest of the country. And it's sad to say in some respects, the situation that many people go through in other parts of Mexico. But, you know, I've employed a lot of guys and gals over the year. And sort of typically it goes like this.

A guy will start working for me when he's 15 or 16 and, you know, helping me in a warehouse, cleaning gear, packing food. maybe they drive boats for me maybe they do some administration for me things like that and you get to know them really well and what you find out is that

they're not the people that are ever going to leave Mexico for any reason. They're not the people that are going to come up here and work in our fields or work in construction they will tell you that they've got it pretty good in Loretto. They're like, you know, we got fish and clams at our feet. We all own our prone property. We don't have a lot of expenses. It's kind of an interesting story when you kind of dig down deep. It makes them very comfortable and makes them confident. And it is a very confident

person down there and a very warm and welcoming and loving person. A lot of fun. You know, anyone that knows the Mexican culture knows that they've been laughing in the face of adversity since Cortez showed up, I suppose. It's okay to say that. I think so, and I think we're going to leave it right there. So, Steve, tell us one more time. What's the best way for folks to find out about C-Trek and what you're doing? Yeah, go on the web and look up C-Trek.com.

S-E-A-T-R-E-K dot C-O-M, you'll find us. And pop us an email, say, hey, Steve, get back to me, and I'll get right back to you. All right. Steve Hayward, it's been a nice day out on the bay here in Sausalito, Sunny, Sausalito. and I look forward to seeing you down in Loretto. Okay, likewise. All right, thanks for making some time for Slow Baja. Yeah, sure, thanks.

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