Sea of Cortez – October 2016 our return after a 25 year absence Howard Hall and Michele Hall

Michele swims over the barren reef at Las Animas

I first went to the Sea of Cortes in 1973, before I considered myself an underwater photographer. I was 23 years old and a pretty good spearfisherman. I had been invited to join a Baja Expeditions trip by my good friend Tim Means who had chartered a shrimp boat, to take passengers out to the Islands near La Paz. This was not a diving trip, but I had brought my speargun anyway. On our first day out we stopped at the north end of Isla Espiritu Santo. That evening I took my speargun in the water. I was surrounded by large pargo, or dog snapper, during my first dive. I picked the one closest to me and shot it. It weighed 45 pounds. After landing the first fish, I realized I should have concentrated on the largest fish I saw rather than the closest. I made another dive and shot a pargo that was much larger. The fish dived deep into a cave and I lost my spear. This October I saw no pargo at the north end of Isla Espiritu Santo.

I made several more trips to the Sea of Cortez as a filmmaker in the early 1980s. I directed three episodes Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and two episodes of ABCs American Sportsman. Our primary location for these films was the Marisula Seamount, also known as El Bajo. In the early-1980s a diver descending to the seamount could expect to find large schools of jacks and tuna, a half dozen or more giant mantas, schools of hammerhead sharks, an occasional whale shark, and often even a sailfish or marlin. It was a great place to make underwater adventure films. During one American Sportsman project, Marty Snyderman and, my wife, Michele, removed a fishing net from an enormous manta ray. Having been “cleaned”

by the divers, the ray followed us around for four days giving our film’s stars, Stan Waterman and Peter Benchley, spectacular rides (well before this was politically incorrect behavior). During these projects, I would take my 16mm movie camera out off the north side of the seamount and free dive into schools hammerheads numbering many hundreds. I remember an old Mexican fisherman telling me that he remembered coming to the seamount and seeing hammerhead shark fins on the surface as far as he could see. I thought this was typical fisherman’s hyperbole. Now I am not so sure.

Once Great Schools of Hammerheads Roamed the Marisula Seamount in 1981

In 1991, Michele and I made a one-hour documentary for the BBC and PBS called Shadows in a Desert Sea. Primarily intended as a marine natural history film, Shadows also became an indictment of overfishing. At lot had already changed on the seamount since my first dives there in the 1980s. The manta rays that once characterized the Marisula Seamount were already gone. We had to move south to the Revillagigedo Islands to find them. Though reduced in number, the hammerheads, tuna, jacks, and snapper were still there. But Bob Cranston and I had to use rebreathers in order to film the hammerheads.

After Shadows, it would be 25 years before I returned to the Sea of Cortez.

This year, Michele and I were joined by Douglas Seifert and Emily Irving aboard the Ambar III. Owned by Mike McGettigan and Sherry Shaffer, the Ambar III is the vessel we used for over 100 days while making Shadows decades earlier. One reason for the 21 day trip was to return to places we filmed during the making of Shadows to experience the change. We were also eager to help Mike and his organization, Sea Watch, initiate a campaign to replicate the amazing fisheries recovery achieved in the Cabo Pulmo National Park in the Archipelago Espiritu Santo National Park. For the last 20 years Cabo Pulmo has experienced an amazing recovery while

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during that same period the rest of the Sea has continued to see rapid declines in fisheries. Unless the success of Cabo Pulmo can be replicated in other places the future of the Sea of Cortez seems bleak. That is why we felt this project so important.

And after not diving the Cortez for 25 years, I found the change stunning. The pargo I hunted at the north end of Espiritu Santo were gone. There was only barren rock and small reef fish. I had been told not to expect any big fish living on the Marisula Seamount. This was no exaggeration. Though this was once considered one of the most exciting dives in the world, it didn’t justify a second dive during our trip. No large animals live there now.

Los Islotes, where we filmed sea lions swimming through dense schools of sardines for Shadows, was largely unchanged. The sea lions were there as were most of the reef fish I remember from 25 years earlier. Oddly, Cortez Angelfish were missing. I saw less than a dozen during our three week trip. The sardines were also gone. But the sardine schools are an occasional occurrence at Los Islotes. Last year, Marty Snyderman dived there and the sardines were thick. However, sardines are now being heavily targeted in the Sea of Cortez and their removal from the base of the food chain is certainly shortsighted. Los Islotes is now protected from fishing and, though illegal fishing is a huge problem there, this protection may account for my generally positive experience there. The main change I noticed was a decrease in invertebrate life there and everywhere we went, which is difficult to explain.

We also visited Isla Ildefonso and Isla Las Animas. During the filming of Shadows, we dived these two sites to capture the beauty of the Gulf’s invertebrate encrusted reefs. From 25 years ago, I remember dense forests of gorgonian corals in myriad colors, and I remember the great many species of small marine creatures that inhabited this dense growth. For some reason, this invertebrate life is now gone. Where I had captured tracking shots through thickets of sea fans and black coral, only barren rock remains. Dr Enric Sala demonstrated how the loss of top predators in the Caribbean can result in the death of a coral reef. Perhaps something like that is happening in the Cortez. Whatever the cause, this was the change I found most disturbing.

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Browncheek Blenny

Though the desert sunsets over beautiful uninhabited islands are as I remember them from decades earlier in the The Sea of Cortez, life beneath the surface is certainly a mere shadow of its former glory. It was hard for me to see this change and perhaps, knowing it was happening, is one reason it took me so long to return. There is hope though. Mike McGettigan has invested decades, through his organization SeaWatch.org, in finding ways to limit commercial and illegal fishing in the gulf. But, perhaps, most encouraging was meeting the many young people who are now dedicated to healing the Cortez. These young people know that the future of the Sea of Cortez is in their hands.

The Archipelago Espiritu Santo

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