Undersea Rescue

The newest residents of Cabo Pulmo were elusive on this cool winter morning, appearing for only an instant before veering off into the blue-green haze, looking eerily like a squadron of alien spacecraft.

Hundreds of bat rays and manta rays arrived in the turquoise bay beyond this desert shore several weeks ago and have been seen almost daily since. Proud locals boast that the rays, as well as other species of subtropical fish, are staying because they feel safer in the newly protected waters of Cabo Pulmo National Marine Park than they do anywhere else off Baja California.

“I think that the fish, and the manta rays, the sting rays . . . I think they know now that this is a national park,” said Mario Castro, 32, whose family’s roots in this sleepy little fishing and agricultural community go four generations deep. “The manta rays are coming here now because it is safe.”

Perhaps. But the rays would keep their distance on this particular day, while the divers, 45 feet beneath the rippling surface, kicked their way over gardens of yellow, green and rust-colored coral, watching a strange but wonderful world unfold.

Pastel parrotfish picked at the coral with their distinctive, razor-like teeth, not overly concerned about the intruders in their midst.

Multicolored angelfish probed about in their elegant way. Navy-colored damselfish chased interlopers from their watery dens and slithering eels snaked through the coral.

But as mesmerizing as these creatures were, it was a small polka-dotted puffer that stole the show. Trapped between two divers, the squarish fish blew itself up to the size of a bowling ball, revealing a tiny mouthful of teeth in a manner that strikingly resembled John Elway’s peculiar smile.

One of the divers laughed so hard he nearly coughed up his regulator.

As the puffer swam off to find some better company, the divers continued on, peering over ledges and into crevices, occasionally gazing skyward in hopes of glimpsing the silhouette of a majestic manta ray, or perhaps the skittish bat rays that had zoomed in earlier.

“It’s like a movie,” Libby Murrieta, wife of the park director, said of the Cabo Pulmo diving experience. “You just want to sit down and watch it go by.”

No Poachers Allowed

Cabo Pulmo isn’t much of a town. It’s a remote little village 65 miles north of Cabo San Lucas at the southern edge of Baja’s popular East Cape, reachable mostly by paved roads but ultimately by a bone-jarring dirt road that winds through a cactus-laden desert before topping out on a bluff overlooking the sparkling Sea of Cortez.

It is the aquamarine waters that long have made Cabo Pulmo a special place for scuba divers, who come to explore the only substantial living coral reefs on the west coast of North America.

There are eight major fingers of reef, varying in depth and each with a personality of its own, attracting everything from tiny wrasses to hammerhead sharks to enormous whale sharks that visit from time to time to feed on plankton.

Last year a 20-foot whale shark somehow got stranded on a section of reef that became exposed when the tide dropped. Castro and some of his relatives rode out in a panga, tied a rope to its tail and pulled it off the reef and watched it swim away.

Not long afterward, a pod of porpoises ventured in and tagged along with a group of divers for nearly an hour.

The water at Cabo Pulmo isn’t the clearest--visibility usually ranges from 30-45 feet in the winter and 50-80 feet in late spring and summer--and the fish aren’t as colorful as they are in Hawaii and Cozumel. But the fish are generally larger--many are of the predator variety, such as jacks, snappers and groupers--and more abundant.

But the richness in sea life has also made southern Baja popular among commercial fishermen, who with gill-nets and other indiscriminate gear have never let Cabo Pulmo realize its full potential as a world-class dive site.

Ironically, it was a group of these fishermen from Sinaloa on the mainland who, with one very productive trip last March, helped turn the tide in favor of diving interests at Cabo Pulmo.

Hoping to take advantage of the rising demand for fish throughout Mexico in Lent, when a predominantly Catholic population gives up meat, they brought shrimp boats as mother ships and small outboard skiffs, or pangas, to set the nets. They had no permits to fish anywhere along the coast, much less within the boundaries of the park, established as a no-fishing zone three years ago. That zone includes an area about 10 miles long and three miles out.

In strategic areas, they dropped weighted nets made of monofilament mesh, which are invisible underwater and trap anything swimming by, usually by the gills. And they made several bountiful hauls, apparently assuming that nobody would notice or care.

But they were mistaken.

Their catch not only included such common creatures as sharks, rays, grunts, jacks and snappers, but a literal tonnage of roosterfish, one of the most highly prized game fish in southern Baja. The species is reserved entirely for sport fishermen who practice catch-and-release because of the poor taste of roosterfish flesh.

“They were catching six to eight tons of fish a day,” said Pepe Murrieta, the park director and a local dive-shop owner. “They would bring the stuff ashore and leave three to four tons of waste after they processed their fish. They would bury the waste with a bulldozer [they had help from at least one local fisherman] and they were just making a huge mess.”

Mark Rayor, 48, a former Torrance real estate executive who moved to nearby Buena Vista seven years ago and established the most comprehensive diving business in the region, witnessed one significant haul and recalled seeing two pangas filled to the gunwales with 40- to 50-pound roosterfish and a stretched-out net that was also full.

“They were gaffing them out of the net one at a time,” he said. “And they were clubbing them and throwing them into one of the pangas.”

There had been no on-site director of the park at the time, and no real enforcement, but such a large-scale operation outraged not only divers, but the resort owners who rely on healthy game fish stocks to stay in business.

Both groups demanded swift action from fisheries officials in La Paz. And they got it. In all, two large vessels and more than a dozen pangas were confiscated. The fishermen were arrested and, eventually, heavily fined.

Significantly, the incident helped bring about a greater sense of public awareness and the appointment by Mexico’s National Ecological Institute (INE) of Murrieta as park director. Murrieta, in turn, formed the nonprofit Patronatos del Este, made up of resort owners, diving and tourism interests, and fisheries officials to administer the goings-on at the park.

Patronatos president Bobby Van Wormer, whose family owns three popular East Cape resorts, said plans are in the works to bring trash service and public water to Cabo Pulmo, which is popular not only among divers but American campers looking for a remote getaway.

Meanwhile, with Easter approaching, Murrieta, his wife Libby and most of the 75-100 residents of Cabo Pulmo are watching the horizon for shrimp boats from Sinaloa, where coastal fisheries long have been devastated by nets and longlines.

Their vigilance paid off earlier this week, as a small flotilla was spotted near park boundaries and promptly turned away.

“They said they were going back to Sinaloa,” Murrieta said. “We hope that is true.”

The Pride of Pulmo

Rayor, owner of Vista Sea Sport in Buena Vista, usually collects his customers by boat north of here at Hotel Palmas de Cortez, his primary booking agent in Los Barriles.

But when the north winds blow, as they do almost daily during the winter, he picks them up by truck and hires pangas from Castro, whose dive shop is literally a stone’s throw from the lapping shores of Cabo Pulmo.

This sets Rayor back an extra $50 or so, but it enables his customers to experience the flavor of this dusty little village as well as that of the pristine reefs beyond its white-sand beach.

Bouncing over the desert road, Rayor eventually rolled over the hill and down into town on a recent trip with two customers and couldn’t believe his eyes: The residents had put in three speed bumps, the first of which slowed his truck to a halt in front of Murietta’s dive shop, a palm-thatched roof over a concrete floor lined with tanks--and no walls!

“What’s with the speed bumps?” Rayor asked, getting out to say hello.

“The town is growing,” Murrieta replied, also pointing to the community’s new mailbox--the only one for miles--at the front of his shop and its only public phone on one of the posts holding up his roof.

“You must be bucking to become mayor of Cabo Pulmo,” Rayor said, waving as he drove off to see Castro about using one of his pangas.

Castro was home, as usual.

“My work is here. My life is here. I have no reason to go anywhere else,” Castro said.

The Castros are an interesting clan. Since the turn of the century, they had made a living fishing local waters and selling their catch south of here at San Jose del Cabo. They were among the most notorious gill-netters in the bay.

“But the family, we talked in private,” Mario Castro said. “We are fishermen here all our life, but scuba diving brings in tourists and now we’ve got more of a future. We vote and say, ‘OK, if the government says this is a national park, we have this forever.’ ”

Rayor and his helper, Jose Luis Silva, and the two customers loaded their gear into one of Castro’s pangas, then jumped in as the Castros shoved them off, with Enrique Castro, one of Mario’s brothers, at the helm.

“The Americans come down here and use the GPS, or Global Positioning System to find the reefs,” Rayor said, en route to the reef. “I’ve got MPS.”

“What’s MPS?” a customer asked.

“Mexican Positioning System,” Rayor replied, pointing to Enrique Castro, who within a matter of minutes, using landmarks on the coast as his only guide,, put the divers directly on the center of a large reef 40 feet below, and smack in the middle of a school of bat rays that--on this day, anyway--wanted nothing to do with the divers.

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--Vista Sea Sport can be contacted in Mexico at 011-52-114-10031, or through Baja Fishing and Resorts at (800) 368-4334. Pepe Murrieta can be reached at 011-52-114-10001. Mario Castro has no phone.