Voyaging through Mexico's Sea of Cortez

ISLA CORONADO, Mexico — As warm saltwater lapped against his legs, Chuck Baxter took delight in the creatures clinging to rocks and skittering around the tidal shallows. His sunburned hands dipped beneath the shimmering surface for a closer examination of starfish, crabs and sponges forming a palette of red, orange, yellow and brown.

Out of this bustling seascape surfaced a question: Why does the marine life look so rich here, when 64 years earlier author John Steinbeck considered this same spot so devoid of life that it appeared "burned," as if exposed to mild "radio-activity"?

That question also rolled around the rear deck of the Gus D., a shrimp trawler jury-rigged into a marine lab. Baxter, a retired Stanford University marine-biology professor, and his mates from Monterey, were retracing the 1940 voyage of Steinbeck and his pal, marine biologist Edward F. Ricketts. Steinbeck made the 4,000-mile trip famous in his nonfiction book "The Log From the Sea of Cortez."

Using the book and Ricketts' original field notes as a baseline, Baxter and his group spent two months seeing what has changed in this long finger of ocean that separates mainland Mexico from Baja California.

On "tranquilo" afternoons on the boat, with a balmy breeze and chocolate and cream hills drifting by, the group stumbled onto the reason the tide pools on Coronado Island impressed them as biologically rich, while Steinbeck considered them especially poor. It all depends on what you're used to.

In Steinbeck's day, the marine life on this tiny island near Loreto was meager compared with places that he and Ricketts found to be "ferocious with life," such as Cabo San Lucas. Now Cabo has been picked nearly clean by fishing and shellfish harvesting, and tainted by polluted runoff from an urbanized coast.

By contrast, tiny uninhabited Isla Coronado just north of Loreto has remained a refuge for sea life, said Baxter, 76, who spent decades lecturing at Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station in Monterey. But overall, he said, "It's not like it used to be."

Desert and sea

The Sea of Cortez, officially known as the Gulf of California, has experienced a stunning decline of sea life in the past few decades, as have many other places.

It's rare to come across the once-plentiful goliath groupers that reached 500 pounds, the giant manta rays known to leap out of the water, the frenzied schools of yellowtail jacks chasing sardines to the shore, the circling columns of hammerhead sharks that once delighted fishermen, tourists and inspired the late oceanographer Jacques Cousteau in 1986 to call the Sea of Cortez the "aquarium of the world."

Still, if you hadn't been here in Steinbeck's or Cousteau's day, the sea wouldn't seem empty, especially along undeveloped stretches where the desert meets the sea.

Motoring north of Isla Coronado, past other small islands that poke out of the aquamarine waters, the boat regularly encountered pods of dolphins, surfing on the bow wake before returning to gambol in the sea, feeding on bait fish. Pelicans glided by and then dropped like winged arrows to pluck fish from the ocean with their oversized beaks.

It wasn't until the end of this spring's trip that Jon Christensen, who helped organize the expedition and is writing a book about it, noted what he and his colleagues didn't see: turtles, sharks, giant manta rays. Without the benefit of Steinbeck's log or Ricketts' notes, he said, it wouldn't have occurred to him how empty the ocean had become.

Steinbeck's book, the first biological survey, provided a crucial early marker for studying changes in the Sea of Cortez. This expedition was a rare opportunity to work from a rediscovered copy of Ricketts' 1940 field notes, as well as the book that incorporated those notes and was polished by a writer who had just completed his most famous novel, "The Grapes of Wrath."

The Sea of Cortez, of course, was far from its natural state when Steinbeck and Ricketts arrived. Most of the pearl oysters, which created an industry that the town of La Paz is founded on, already had been stripped from the sea in a massive treasure hunt. U.S. and Japanese fishing boats had begun pursuing tuna and shrimp, and sea lions for pet food, as well as sharks for their livers, to remedy iron-poor "tired blood."

During his Baja adventure, Steinbeck boarded a Japanese shrimp trawler and was appalled that the weighted nets would tear up the ocean floor, and pull in nine pounds of fish that would be shoveled overboard dead for every pound of shrimp. He saw good men "caught in a large destructive machine," which he accused of "committing a true crime against nature."

These foreign fleets were long ago booted from Mexican waters, and replaced by a fleet of Mexican shrimp trawlers and tuna boats, and thousands and thousands of small skiffs, called "pangas," which multiplied with government subsidies in the 1970s and '80s. Each panga spreads gill nets — banned in many parts of the world — which indiscriminately kill anything large enough to get snagged in their webbing.

Finding a ship

Steinbeck had a tough time finding a ship. There were plenty of sardine boats in Monterey in 1940, but they were busy supplying the packing houses of Cannery Row.

Many captains turned him down. Even the Sicilian-American crew of the Western Flyer, a white sardine boat that eventually took them, revealed their disdain for Steinbeck's mission.

"Aw, we're going down in the Gulf to collect starfish and bugs and stuff like that," crew member Sparky Enea radioed a friend on another boat that had just hauled aboard 15 tons of sardines.

Lining up the Gus D. for this year's trip was much easier, even though captain and owner Frank Donahue kept telling Mexican fishermen his passengers were "locos scientificos."

This was no luxury cruise. Many of those aboard slept in tents pitched on the upper deck and clustered together like a cliff-side encampment of mountaineers. The 73-foot vessel is sturdy and seaworthy, but far from the sleek, polished boat that ferried Steinbeck. The Gus D., although about the same size and color as the Western Flyer, is easily distinguished by the plywood patches on the hull and rusting outrigger booms overhead.

This trip, like the first, was designed as a getaway adventure. It began as dreamy talk over some beers one afternoon at Hopkins Marine Station. William F. Gilly, a neurobiologist there, had been casting about for a new direction in his field of study.

He also wanted to design a last great adventure for his septuagenarian friend, Chuck Baxter. More than 50 years earlier, Baxter had been so inspired by a copy of Ricketts' "Between Pacific Tides" that he abandoned his engineering studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and switched to marine biology. He was besotted with the idea of literally following the footsteps of the man who changed the course of his life.

Baxter invited a former student, Nancy Packard Burnett. The two are among the co-founders of the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

For Christensen, a freelance writer, the trip offered a subject for his first book about science and adventure. He kept a blog — www.seaofcortez.org — so that others could track the journey.

When they arrived in the Sea of Cortez, the difference that 60 years can make slowly became apparent.

Steinbeck wrote effusively about "schools of leaping tuna all about us, and whenever we crossed the path of a school, our lines jumped and snapped under the strikes, and we brought the beautiful fish in." The Gus D. crew also set their lines, hoping to catch dinner. "We've only had luck fishing with pesos," Baxter said. That is, buying fish. There were no tuna to be seen on the trip.

This group worked hard to keep alive the spirit of the original voyage. They stopped at the same tidal shallows as their predecessors; they hunted for the same marine creatures that Ricketts had cataloged and collected in jars of formaldehyde.

"Never before on this trip, even when we were walking directly in their footsteps and surveying the same tide pools, have we felt as close to the spirits of John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts," Christensen wrote in his blog, juxtaposed with Steinbeck's observations.

"Here, instead of following them, we are doing what they did, exploring the Sea of Cortez and life in an open-ended leisurely fashion, letting the great force of the gulf carry us along."