In this month’s Changes in Latitudes we catch up with Marga Pretorius aboard the Kelly-Peterson 44 Dogfish.

I’m anchored at the edge of Bahia de las Animas in the northern Sea of Cortez. It’s an area I’ve visited many times over the years, and yet this year I have learned something new — this area has been considered a place of spirits by many centuries of travelers and residents. There is undeniably something special here: light filtering through stacked hills, zephyrs swirling down broken coastlines, coyotes howling to clear night skies, faint morning mists that nip at the edges of rocky points. It is a place of whale breaths and whipping currents, bookended by neighbors aptly named Guardian Angel Island and Leave if You Can Island.

Befitting such a place, the nights here are not quiet. Hundreds of gnats, moths, and dragonflies collect on the lenses of my lit cabin lights, so that when I step below, the air inside Dogfish is filled with a faint, high-pitched buzzing. Outside, the sea comes alive in splashes and light, pulses of bioluminescence as bait balls boil around me, fish in a frantic attempt to feed and not be feed, an orchestra of a thousand mouths on the water’s surface. Sometimes I’m awakened suddenly by a loud exhale, and I swear it is a human swimming alongside my hull. But when I jump out on deck to look, all I see is the vanishing glow of a turtle or a sea lion descending back into the depths.

The days have their own mysteries. On the northern beach there is a collection of long-unused palapas, whose deterioration I have marked through the years of anchoring here. It was/is an eco resort that in tense, defying-Baja fashion, is both abandoned and not yet completed. Cruisers swap stories of why a place so beautiful has been left for the desert to reclaim.

I was thinking about this hallowed reputation as I watched the outlying midriff islands from my cockpit yesterday, monitoring them on the evaporating horizon as the shapeshifters once again transformed under the heat of the sun. Daily they balloon into unnatural proportions, becoming gigantic and more rectangular as the sun climbs, then deflating into natural proportions once the sun hangs low. That afternoon, as we lingered through an improvised yoga session in one of the nearly intact palapas, my friend Debbie told me there is a name for the lurching posturing of the islands. It is called a Fata Morgana, a type of mirage.

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