There was no captain. And no boat. There I stood, carrying a bag full of sand dollars, wondering how I got into such a messy situation.
I stood in the middle of the coastal sand dunes that separated Santa Maria Bay (part of the Pacific Ocean) from Magdalena Bay. The captain, a friend, and I had left the beachhead of the former and were on our way back to the sailboat. Except there was no captain. And no boat. There I stood, carrying a bag full of sand dollars, wondering how I got into such a messy situation.
A couple hours earlier, the three of us had anchored inside Magdalena Bay and took a dinghy a couple hundred meters onto shore. We eventually hit a small marshland and had to drag the boat onto the sand. Very few people had ever entered the bay and, being in an indigenous area of Mexico, the captain wanted to take us to a remote beach littered with thousands of pristine sand dollars.
The problem was, we were running on a timeline. Tides were currently low and we had only dragged the 200-pound dinghy a few feet off from the water; we prodded the water pipe into the mud which only added a false sense of security that it was safe from being swept away by high tides. At 72 years of age, the captain would not have been able to swim back to the boat without the dinghy– not to mention, he was the only person on board who knew how to operate the boat.
After traversing through a quarter-mile thick strip of uneven hilly terrain, hot white sand, and thorny shrubs, we finally reached the side of the ocean. There it was in front of me: thousands of sand dollars partially buried inside a five-mile long beachhead. With the exception of our invasive footprints, the sand was perfectly carved and gave a pure, uninhabited look. We spent the next half hour collecting the priceless souvenirs and back to the boat we headed.
The captain grew worried about high tides and beckoned my friend and I to walk ahead to retrieve the dinghy. Ten minutes later, in the middle of the sand dunes, he was nowhere to be seen. After waiting on top of a mound for a while, we hurriedly retraced our steps to find him, hoping he hadn’t collapsed from exhaustion or injury. Twenty minutes thereafter, we found him walking back towards the ocean.
Due to holding the bag on one hand and staring downward to watch his step, the uneven weight distribution had propelled the captain to make a U-turn and face the wrong beach. When he eventually looked up and saw no boat, he panicked and hastened his own pace, thereby impeding us from finding him sooner. Once we were back on track, I was ordered to retrieve the dinghy. Running at full pace, I reached the marshland only to find that the high tides never came. In retrospect, the hour-long despair, and splintered and prickled soles made acquiring the sand dollars ten times more worth it.
