I have alluded to the problems that John Steinbeck and Doc Rickets had with their outboard motor on the tender that they used to explore the natural history of the Gulf of California. Steinbeck describes these problems early in his account of the expedition in The Log From the Sea of Cortez, originally published in 1941. The following is an abridged version of his description.

"Our Hansen Sea Cow was not only a living thing, but mean, irritable, vengeful, mischievous, hateful living thing....We observed the following traits in it and we were able to check them again and again:

1. Incredibly lazy, the Sea-Cow loved to ride on the back of the boat, trailing its propeller daintily in the water while we rowed.
2. It required the same amount of gasoline whether it ran or not....
3. It had apparently some clairvoyant powers, and was able to read our minds, particularly when they were inflamed with emotion. Thus, on every occasion when we were driven to the point of destroying it, it started and ran with great purpose and excitement. This served the dual purpose of saving its life and resurrected in our minds a false confidence in it.
4. It had many cleavage points, and when attacked with a screwdriver, fell apart in simulated death, a trait it had in common with opossums...which also fall apart in simulated death when attacked by a screwdriver.
5. It hated Tex, sensing perhaps that his knowledge of mechanics was capable of diagnosing its shortcomings.
6. It completely refused to run (a) when the waves were high, (b) when the wind blew, (c) at night, early morning, and evening, (d) in rain, dew, or fog, (e) when the distance to be covered was more than two hundred yards....
7. It loved no one, trusted no one. It had no friends."

Steinbeck concluded "when and if these ghoulish little motors learn to reproduce themselves, the human species is doomed." In spite of all this, I think that when it came to outboard engines, Steinbeck was an optimist.

Credible evidence exists that our panga had the Yamaha progeny of the Hansen Sea Cow (a thinly disguised reference to the Johnson Sea Horse) for it seems that we had constant problems with the motor, although there were rare, notable moments when it ran without effort, usually after we threatened to kill it.

The engine on our panga lulled us in to a false sense of security, because it ran fairly well the first day and a half. On the morning of the third day, at the remote Wolf Island, the engine revealed its true malevolent character. The day was overcast and a small swell chopped the sea’s surface creating just enough of a pitch on the boat that we had to exercise care transferring to and from the panga. During the dive site briefing, we were warned that the area could have variable current, and that it could be very strong. These are the exact conditions we crave since the current will bring the large critters that we seek in from deep water.

For a diver, swimming in a stiff current can be exhausting, especially when you are pushing a king crab-sized camera through the water. The only way I think one could prepare for this eventuality would be to swim with fins in a pool while pushing a kickboard vertically through the water. Even worse, getting caught in the current can mean a long, lonely drift ala the Open Water thriller that ran in theaters this summer--a story about a couple that surfaces only to find their dive boat left them behind.

As we approach the entry point, the engine and sputtered and died. Jacinto, the panga driver, furiously tugs at the starter chord in an unsuccessful attempt to coax the engine back to life. He then reverted to checking the connections between the gas tank and the engine before resuming his assault on the chord. Raphael, our guide and naturalist, suggests that we abandon the panga and swim to the drop in point. This idea is met with stone-cold silence. Perhaps thinking we did not hear the suggestion because of the cold water hoods that we wear obstruct our ears, he repeats it, only to have it met with a more strident silence...a kind of unspoken "not only no, but hell no". Just then the engine sputters to life, brought back from the dead by the triage and aid rendered by Jacinto, and the mutiny on the panga that would have inevitably followed the third reading of the suggestion that we swim for it. Over the next few days I would come to admire Jacinto’s patience and creativity in dealing with the panga. Some of these attempts included use of both hands and feet in a contortionist’s stance to get the engine started

We are diving an area known as "The Landslide" after the prominent feature that scars the side of the island. The plan is to drop down to 60 feet, spread out about 10 to 15 feet apart, and wait for the current to bring the hammerheads in to the wall. We had a few sharks approach, but nothing in the great numbers the photographers need to get the shots that they have come to get. The second dive is nearly a carbon copy of the first dive and we follow a nearly identical strategy with similar results. But then the definition of insanity is doing something the same way as before and expecting a different outcome. So it was with the engine on the panga.

The motor behaved like a temperamental prima donna, working only when it wanted and after receiving a lot of attention, for much of the trip. We fared little better with the spare engine which served as backup and understudy, taking its cue from the original engine. Our frustration with mechanical things peaked the next day when the fresh water maker decided to join its engine brethren in the general strike and ceased making water just as many of the divers were in their stateroom showers lathered up with the end-of-the-dive day cleansing and hose down. The water maker is eventually restored to operation by the now-harried engineer.

Our concern regarding the reliability of the panga’s engine is not a matter of mere delay and inconvenience. These vessels are the only thing standing between a successful pick up at the end of the dive and the possibility of being lost as sea. I do not mean to sound melodramatic, this area is known for strong currents and prospective divers constantly reminded that this is not a location for the novice or less-experienced diver. Much of the activity involves drift diving in a fairly strong current and ascending to a sea surface that can have a pretty good swell running. Ideally, each panga follows its divers, picking up each of us as we surface. During a dive at Cape Marshall, the presence of small pelagic jelly fish brought in by the current decreased the already low visibility from the green water. The two groups of divers started the dive apart but soon became intermixed. By the end of the dive, which seemed to cover a fair length of the island because of current, diver pickup was random, we were picked up by whatever panga was closest, with little regard for which panga we started the dive from just a short time before.

But the engine was not the only concern we had about the panga. Imagine sitting on a mechanical bull while wearing full scuba gear and you have an idea as to what a panga ride in rough seas can be like, you are going to feel every bump and buck. Exacerbating the ride was the lack of handholds on the side of the panga, which are usually placed to give the diver something to hold on to for stability in rough seas. With these missing, the result can be a filling rattling, bone jarring, vertebrae misaligning experience. Had we stayed much more than two weeks, the resulting therapy would have paid for the addition to my chiropractor’s house.

Rigid-hull inflatables are generally pretty seaworth workhorses, but several in our party have expressed reservations about the reliability of the powerplant affixed to the craft’s transom and the tendency of the craft to take on water during low speeds which precludes self-bailing. We had to position ourselves far to the rear to keep the boat from swamping.

Jacinto in our group’s boat and Marlo in the other group’s boat, seem pretty adroit at handling these small craft. Their seamanship is demonstrated during a pickup from Suarez Point on Espinola Island. Each vessel had to navigate a narrow channel with a rock reef to seaward and a rapidly shoaling beach landward. The sea broke over the rock reef making the channel extraordinarily rough. Complicating the pickup were several sea lion who blocked the normal extraction point, necessitating that we scramble over the rocks like so many Sally Lightfoot crabs to get to a shallower extraction point.

Besides seamanship, the panga skippers also haul our gear into the panga at the end of the dive. The normal procedure for exiting the panga is a simple back roll, a maneuver most divers practice from a pool edge during certification but seldom have the opportunity to use again, since the normal entry from high freeboard boats is the giant stride entry. Getting back into the panga takes a bit more effort. On surfacing, the diver gives the universal hands-in-a-semicircle-over-the-head "O.K" signal to the boat operator who then motors over to extract the diver. We hand up cameras, remove our tank and buoyancy compensator which the lower-back-weightlifter-belt-worn-under-the-lifejacket panga driver then hauls into the boat, remove and hand up our weight belt before doing a handstand press on the panga’s air chamber to clamber over the side and into the boat. People who have observe my technique for getting back into the panga say it reminds them of watching a bull sea lion haul out onto a floating dock in Monterey and that it is more entertaining than the orca show at Seaworld.

On rare occasion, I have had to signal my return to the surface with the loud-almost-deafening screeeetch from the air horn signaling device that fits inline between my power inflator hose and the power inflator for the buoyance compensator. This device has one purpose to get the attention of the boat. In addition, each diver has a dive tube or sausage that can be inflated and held vertically to draw attention to a diver riding low in the water who may be obscured by high seas. Some of us carry strobe lights, signal mirrors, and dye markers, devices that will increase the likelihood being spotted should the sea decide to take us adrifting.

At a place that is little more than a small rock in a big ocean, conditions seemed to be right for one or more divers to go missing. The current was fast and the height of the seas made it difficult to spot the divers. I was the first one back to the panga. I could see the look of concern in the face of Marlo, as if he was muttering a silent prayer to "please don’t let me miss spotting someone when they ascend." The language barrier and probably cultural restraints kept him from voicing concern. He didn’t need to verbalize the situation, I recognized the look from my time working as a divemaster on boats at the California Channel Islands. And as for the prayer, I had muttered it myself on a couple of occasions. Fortunately, all those prayers were answered on this trip and the answer was "O.K."