Dinner was served, and speeches were in order. We looked over the display of sewn ornaments of baby Jesus' and handwritten scrolls, and a dessert plate without any desserts. And at the sight of the winnings, we decided to drive off, to the southern edge of Bahia Conception. We ended up at the southern end of Bahia Concepcion's coast, crossing a muddy road to the mangroves, where we set camp, played Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, and finished a bottle of Hornitos.

It was a good time to untie Sonora, and explore the mangrove shallows. I put on my headlamp, and shoved off into the dark. Mangroves hold a special place in my heart; their awkwardness, their housing of strange creatures. Like the shady place beneath a banyan, or a David Grisman Quintet ditty, they are tangled, confusing, subtle and hip. At closer inspection, the mangroves are cities in miniature; one-way streets of fish, and crabs, and reddish egrets bobbing their heads - the yellowish interplay of light in the leaves is Brooklyn's flickering neon.

What in light-muddled night assumes an eerie bioluminescence, is in complete darkness, magic. Hans and I understood little about the flagellate plankton that glow bright green when slightly agitated as a way of scaring predators. But days later, when we settled our campsite at a palapa in Bahia Coyote, we rolled our kayaks off the sand, out into the quiet Cortez, and north, to Isla Piedra, and on its Eastern shores.