SAN IGNACIO LAGOON, Mexico – The day was like any other, and Francisco “Pachico” Mayoral was out fishing for black sea bass. Then the head of a whale emerged from the water and began rubbing against his small wooden dory.
Mayoral knew all about “devilfish,” the name whale hunters gave California gray whales in recognition of their legendary ship-splintering counterattacks. He had always kept a respectful distance from the whales that come each winter to this salty lagoon halfway down the Baja Peninsula to breed and nurse their young.
The massive head soon slipped back under the water. Then it popped up on the other side of his boat. The routine continued for 40 minutes. One side. Then the other. On this day, Mayoral wasn’t afraid. He reached out with one finger and touched the whale. The whale moved closer. The fisherman reached again and petted the whale.
This first encounter with a “friendly” gray whale in San Ignacio Lagoon 33 years ago transformed this sleepy fishing village into a celebrated place where humans can make contact with one of the world’s largest and most powerful creatures.
San Ignacio Lagoon has receded from the top of conservationists’ priority campaigns since the battle was apparently won five years ago to protect the lagoon from a giant salt production plant, a joint venture of Mitsubishi and the Mexican government.
After stirring words from a Mexican poet, letters from worried children and broadcast images of teary-eyed Hollywood celebrities, Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo took a boat ride with his wife and children and had their own close encounter with the lagoon’s nuzzling whales.
Four days later, Zedillo pulled the plug on the saltworks project.
Now, residents around San Ignacio Lagoon and conservationists working in Mexico are worried that the commitment of one man, long out of office, could be undone.
Political momentum in Mexico’s capital appears to be shifting toward a different vision for the future, one of industrialization, for this isolated lagoon and the few hundred rural poor who live here.
And a Baja businessman, purportedly representing the salt production company, recently asked if landowners were willing to sell thousands of acres of salt flats next to the lagoon, a wind-blown area ideal for extracting salt from seawater.
‘Forty tons of love’
Winding through a forest of cordon cactus, dipping in and out of soft sand in the bottom of arroyos and past herds of skittish cattle, the dirt road to San Ignacio opens onto the flats – mud flats and salt flats – as far as the eye can see. The monotony of the stretch is broken only by pools of collected water, sometimes colored red by salt-tolerant bacteria.
Each winter, about 2,500 tourists make the 1 1/2-hour, tire-chewing drive from the town of San Ignacio to the lagoon, or fly into a dusty airstrip next to a handful of primitive eco-tourism camps with tents or plywood cabinas. It’s off-the-grid camping: outhouses, lights powered by solar panels, showers from bags of water warmed by the sun.
Most visitors come from the United States or Europe. Few Mexican tourists visit. One adventurous woman from Hermosillo, marveling at the brightness of the Milky Way against the darkened camp, put it this way: The well-heeled in Mexico would rather go to a four-star hotel than a hotel with 1,000 stars.
Raul Lopez, coordinator of Kuyima Ecoturismo, ushered visitors onto a 22-foot dory, or “panga.” Soon it was bouncing through the shallow backwaters to the designated whale-watching area, a deeper channel near the mouth of the lagoon.
Several hundred whales, mostly pairs of cows and their calves, take refuge in San Ignacio Lagoon for a few weeks each winter while the newborns gain weight and strength for the migration north to feeding grounds off Alaska.
All the camps work together, Lopez explained. Only 16 boats are allowed at one time, and all must remain in the deep channel so whales can dive if they want to elude them. Boat drivers are not to pursue whales, but to let the creatures choose to approach them.
Within minutes, seawater roiled in a fury of bubbles. A gray shadow came into view, inches beneath the surface. It stretched twice as long as the boat, too close to make sense of the shape. The boatman, hand on the tiller, looked nervous. He popped the outboard into reverse and began to back away.
Whomp! The bow of the dory swung wildly. The barnacled snout of a gray whale surfaced. The whale began to turn, belly up, and slipped under the boat. The dory was filled with the sound of rubbery flesh squeaking against the fiberglass hull.
“It’s Valentina,” Lopez said, explaining that the whale got her nickname when she showed up last year on Valentine’s Day.
One flipper, raised about 4 feet out of the water, came along one side of the boat. Another flipper came along the opposite side. Gently cradling the dory between her flippers, Valentina lifted it slightly out of the water. Passengers grabbed for the rails.
“It’s a whale hug,” Lopez said. “Forty tons of love.”
Swimming on her back with the dory balanced on her broad chest, Valentina took passengers for a short ride. Some squealed with delight, while others sat silently in awe.
The boat shuddered again as another whale broke the surface. This one was smaller and darker. Lopez leaned over the gunnel and scratched its smooth, bulbous forehead and gave it a kiss.
This year, Lopez said, Valentina showed up with a calf.
The small community of whale-watching outfits wants more than to just limit the boats on the water. It wants to limit growth on land to protect the last pristine gray whale refuge on the Baja coast.
“We don’t want a Disneyland here,” Lopez said. “We don’t want big resorts or industrial plants. We want to use the land in a smart way so we can create a sustainable way to live.”
‘Ejidos’ enticed to sell
Lopez, 43, isn’t the typical fisherman turned whale-watching guide. He came here two dozen years ago as a college-educated fisheries extension agent to try to reduce overfishing and help develop a sustainable catch. Whale watching emerged as alternative employment for fishermen after populations of turtles, black sea bass and bay scallops had crashed.
Lopez married into the community and is now president of an “ejido,” or communal landholding group, formally known as Ejido Luis Echeverria.
Much of Baja California is held as common land by rural ejidos. The million acres that drain into San Ignacio Lagoon are split among six ejidos. Luis Echeverria, one of the largest, is located in the middle, with much of the coastal land used by whale-watching groups.
Ejidos did not have the power to sell communal lands until Mexico adopted legal reforms in the 1990s. Now ejidos are being enticed with offers to buy their land, exposing new areas of Baja and elsewhere to private development.
But the new laws also gave ejidos the power to sell easements that restrict development. So Ejido Echeverria, led by the same people who run the whale-watching operations, has been negotiating with a conservation group to sell the development rights on 120,000 acres of communal lands in exchange for a trust fund that will pay $25,000 a year in perpetuity for community projects, such as improving schools.
Ejido members formally voted March 20 to give Lopez the power to sign a deal with Pronatura, Mexico’s oldest and largest conservation group.
Although Mexican land deals are notoriously unpredictable, Miguel Angel Vargas, a coordinator with Pronatura, said the deals around San Ignacio Lagoon are being structured so that Pronatura’s lawyers have legal power to defend the easements and prosecute un-permitted development. Each deal will have a defense fund to pay attorney fees.
“We don’t have a lot of confidence in the federal government, especially in San Ignacio Lagoon,” Vargas said.
Economic pressures
Homero Aridjis, a Mexico City poet and head of the conservation-minded Group of 100, said that longtime supporters of the San Ignacio Lagoon salt plant are lining up behind the front-runner to be Mexico’s next president. It makes him think the government may resurrect the project.
He said a second salt plant would despoil the lagoon, which is the heart of the Vizcaino Biosphere Reserve, Latin America’s largest naturally protected area. Aridjis helped inspire the reserve in 1988 as a way to protect the gray whale’s breeding and birthing lagoons, but its protections can be trumped by economic interests.
“In Mexico, there is little understanding of the need to have places which are left wild,” Aridjis said. “The prevailing philosophy is that nature has to pay its way and that development and business comes first.”
Los Angeles Times photo
The barnacled snout of a gray whale greets visitors aboard a dory run by Kuyima Ecoturismo in San Ignacio Lagoon, Mexico.
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