Beach Walks on El Mogote

December 1, 2022  

The north-western side of the harbour of La Paz is a long spit of land called El Mogote (the mound), which stretches out from the mainland of the Baja Peninsula.  It is very narrow at its start, but widens out the further out the harbour it goes. 

The shoreline is a mixture of mangroves, mini estuaries, and sandy beaches, and closer out to the end of El Mogote, just out beyond where we are anchored, starts a very long, sandy beach.  This beach wraps around the entire tip of El Mogote and wraps along the outer shore all the way back to mainland Baja. 

The start of this beach is just a very short row in our tender, and we frequently go there for swims and long beach walks.  One thing that we often find washed up on shore is a dead Porcupine Puffer Fish.

They are almost always puffed up with their spikes sticking out and their cute little faces.  

Most of them are fairly small, but we have been very surprised at the size of a couple of them that we have found, almost a foot and a half long. 

We also often see other types of fish washed up and sometimes mummified on shore. 

There is a surprising lack of shells that wash up on this beach, perhaps because of the strong current passing by, but there is never a shortage of things to find and look at. 

Just the other day we came across a full skeleton of a turtle.  We also discovered some previously marked turtle nests. 

Up on the hot dry sand, never too far from the line of small plants and bushes, we often see sand lizards. 

They are so perfectly camouflaged to the colour of the sand that they are nearly impossible to spot until they move, but when they decide to run they can run along at amazing speeds.   

The majority of El Mogote Peninsula is uninhabited, but out on the point there is a grouping of low-rise condominium buildings, and further on a small section of small cottage-like houses, with a golf course in behind them.  The condominium buildings are quite interesting; one semicircular grouping of five buildings is fully completed with palm trees in the open courtyard that faces the beach and a lovely pool.  The second semicircular grouping, however, is only partially completed, one building is fully finished and occupied, but the others are all in different states of completion. 

If one had pre-purchased those condos it would have been very disappointing to have your place never completed.  Also the people in the one building that is finished have a ghost town for a view, with an unfinished courtyard of mini sand dune shrubs, and only a concrete hole in the ground for a pool.  Apparently this area has remained like that for many years.   

Every evening, it seems, at around 16:45, the tropicbirds become very active in feeding around our boat. 

Many of them gather, flying back and forth looking for small fish on the surface of the water, and then diving for them. 

They are quite a talkative bird with a very neat voice; their call is like a trill, very multi-pitched and quite unmistakable.  Wherever the tropicbirds are feeding there are always lurking frigatebirds that will take advantage of any opportunity to steal a fish. 

It is quite rare that we see a frigatebird feeding, and when we do, they do not seem very successful, but there sure are a lot of them.  We often, however, will see them chasing down a tropicbird, relentlessly pursuing it until it drops its fish at which time the frigatebird easily snatches it from the air.  It is quite an impressive aerodynamic display, but I always feel bad for the tropicbird.