If you love sea life, you can’t miss it
BY CAPTAIN AHAB
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The NIM in La Paz is one of those elegant restaurants which quietly set down roots, and over decades, established themselves as an essential part of the fabric of a city. Deservedly so, as they have excellent food and a beautiful old building, which sweeps around a large leafy corner with a gentle charm.
Among their many attractions, they regularly host the work of artists and are currently featuring something pretty unique.
Christopher Swann came to La Paz 25 years ago and has come to call it home for a great part of the year. More than the town, it is the sea that he calls home because he spends ample time on it. For almost two decades he ran whale-watching trips, first using catamarans chartered from Moorings and then his own.
Once the charter trips were finished, he was out exploring in his panga, and he went everywhere: the Pacific lagoons, the Cape and the Sea of Cortes up to Isla Angel de la Guarda and Isla Tiburon. Having finally sold his catamaran, he is back to panga life and never more happily so. Last spring he did over 1,000 miles just between Bahia de Los Angeles and Bahia Kino and has explored almost all of it in search of marine life, particularly whales.
He had no interest in photography to start with.
“Simply looking was all the delight I needed,” he says.
Then on a six-month expedition to Crozet to film killer whales with a French production company, he decided he might get a camera. Being a novice, he didn’t take any batteries and the camera remained almost unused. But it started him off and, on his return, he started taking photos in earnest; however, it was only after some of his clients very generously gave him his first digital camera that things took off. He went on to become an award-winning photographer, (twice a finalist in the Wildlife Photographer of the Year, the world’s most prestigious wildlife photo competition) with his work featured in assorted publications including National Geographic.
The other result of that early gift is two things: a unique portfolio of work and a stunning book, The Sea of Dreams, and both are currently on sale at the NIM.
The huge book covers most areas of the Sea of Cortes and the Pacific coast and the attendant wildlife and is surely destined to become a collector’s item. It is quite hard to comprehend that this is all the work of one person for it covers so much, so many species and with such fabulous photos.
As a measure of the quality you can expect, here are two snips of praise for his previous book Seeking Leviathan:
Sir David Attenborough “It is truly spectacular and a magnificent tribute to a magnificent and very precious group of animals.”
Carl Safina “Your work is stunning, over and over again. I’ve spent enough time with cetaceans to understand a little bit about how difficult it is to get a good photo, let alone one iconic image after another as you have achieved.”
Slowly, year after year his collection of photos grew. Whales were his passion and profession so to speak but by this time he was completely in love with the Baja and reveled in exploring the land as well and had turned his lens towards other subjects and landscapes. The birds and mangroves are a particular favourite.
There have been countless mishaps and endless minor disasters like his Jeep stuck in the desert, steering lost in the panga, building bird hides that got stolen, falling into thorn bushes in the dead of night and more. Sleeping in the panga means many wet mornings on the Pacific coast as the dew is heavy and the fog his nemesis. Occasionally he has been caught by rain and has had to sit it out trapped in the mud waiting for high water and the mangroves waders.
This is a life’s work and passion and reminds me of Ray Cannon’s book The Sea of Cortez. It’s a book Christopher frequently references as he says everything has changed so dramatically since he first came here. At the outset, the amount of marine life was simply staggering.
So enthralled he wrote to his clients exhorting them to Come to the Sea of Cortes whatever you do, whatever it takes. Sell the house, sell your socks, sell the children if needs be but come to the Sea of Cortes. And they weren’t disappointed.
Having gone far north in the summer of 2014 he thought they were well outside any areas that might catch a hurricane but unfortunately got caught by Odile, the biggest to affect the Baja peninsula in living memory. They were lucky and, apart from an unpleasant night, survived unharmed.
The last 25 years have been idyllic he says. It was everything he had dared to hope for and more. He came to know islands that had been only names on a map and the waters around them became familiar territory. He made his own charts and pilot books. There was no one in sight. Months passed, seasons changed, whales came and went, and birds migrated. In the hot summer months, the skies were dark with thunderclouds during the day and bright with lightning at night. The thermometer stood at over 105° for weeks.
A note from his logbook:
The Sea of Cortes; dark racing green. When I first arrived it seethed and boiled, a tumult of life. Deep cold waters, tidal gyres, powerful upwellings, strong stirring winds, abundant krill, phytoplankton, and a food chain working overtime. Derby Day crowds; everybody came, whales, dolphins, sailfish, dorado, manta rays, sharks, turtles, osprey, squid, sea lions, fishes, pelicans, boobies, gulls, marlin.
How can I tell you? What can I tell you? Perhaps only excerpts from my diaries and logbook can make any sense of the sheer abundance of it all, the continual day and night cetacean jamboree.(www.cswannphotography.com)
