Sea of Cortez is still well worth an expedition

Chugging across the glassy blue Sea of Cortez, several questions come to mind when you realize "a couple of dolphins" on the distant horizon are actually a bochinche, an organized, roiling feeding frenzy with untold hundreds of the playful mammals with the evil grin.

First, who came up with the Spanish word for a "dolphin feeding orgy"? And, more importantly: Are we gonna need a bigger boat?

Nearly seventy years after novelist John Steinbeck and marine biologist Ed Ricketts published their book about a wild and compelling expedition on the Western Flyer into this 700-mile slice up Mexico's left flank, the best way to experience the gulf and its Galapagos-like islands still is the way they did it: in a small ship.

It's clear from the book "Log from the Sea of Cortez" that this remote region only really reveals its secrets to travelers willing to make close contact, which explains how I came to be on a 70-passenger Lindblad Expeditions ship, the National Geographic Sea Bird, exploring stunning and forbidding land and sea - including some that hasn't changed since Ricketts and Steinbeck sailed through.

Shaped by the San Andreas

Created by a few million years of lazy tectonic slip along the San Andreas Fault (it's only a matter of time before Cabo ends up next to Bakersfield), the Sea of Cortez is widely considered the youngest sea on the planet. Equally important in its history and ecology: There is no water, at least no reliable, regular source - springs are rare and, in some parts, rain occurs less frequently than Easter.

So while the gulf itself is a soup of sea life, the peninsula, as well as the 200 or so gulf islands, are largely undeveloped outside of Cabo, La Paz and Loreto - a fact that in modern times made them much easier to declare as protected lands.

It has had other names, including the Vermillion Sea (a dramatic moniker that proved to be fitting during our voyage), and the modern Gulf of California - which sounds too much like what's left of the West Coast after The Big One, so I sided with Steinbeck and Ricketts on the Sea of Cortez.

In 1940, the pair chartered a sardine boat out of Monterey for a 4,000-mile voyage to collect thousands of marine invertebrates from the teeming wealth of tide pools. Instead of being a clinical guide to six weeks of collecting species, the book they co-authored offers a vivid story of their interaction with locals and, at times, lengthy passages of philosophical pondering on everything from human nature to the mystical properties of the city of La Paz.

In the book, they described their trip and expedition: "We had no urge toward adventure. ... None of us was possessed of the curious boredom within ourselves which makes adventurers of bridge players."

While not a bridge player myself, I was fairly certain that seeing some of what they had seen would be, well, an adventure.

Marine monsters

While the easy way to snorkel would have been to wade in from the beach at Los Islotes, there were a couple of minor problems:

-- There is no beach;

-- The only land resembling a beach was a rocky terrace covered with 800-pound monsters: bloated, leathery bull sea lions doing their best impression of howler monkeys with a smoker's cough and a beer-swiller's belch.

Adventures are rarely about the easy way.

We picked out wetsuits and snorkel gear, loaded into Zodiac boats and threw ourselves into the choppy waters around the tiny rock islands that hundreds of California sea lions - and, I'm guessing from the guano, about 8 trillion birds - call home.

The payoff was sharing the sea with the younger animals, whose freakish agility and puppy-like curiosity (and faces) made it impossible not to smile - a problem for those with a mouthful of snorkel.

Resting in the bobbing Zodiac, I remembered that Ricketts and Steinbeck had devoted several pages of the book to sea monsters and humanity's need to believe in them. It was as close as I'd come to mythical beasties in the wild.