Time on or in the sea is fine, but a shore stroll beats all

As much as I love sailing, snorkeling and visiting wildlife refuges, my true obsession is beach walking. Sand beaches are my favorite, but in their absence I will stumble along pebbled shorelines, pick my way through rock piles and scramble up, over and around boulders. Whatever it takes. These strips of land touched by the sea are loaded with treasures and curiosities found nowhere else.

Here in Mexico’s Ban­de­ras Bay, where I’m getting my 37-foot sailboat ready for a three-week cruise, I work on the boat most of the day, and as dusk approaches, off I rush to one of the two sand beaches that extend from each side of my marina.

The sand here is brown to gray, being made up of broken rocks rather than the calcium carbonate skeletons of marine animals that make up Hawaii’s white sand beaches.

No coral reefs grow here along Mexico’s tropical Pacific coast. The water is warm enough but not clear enough.Reef-building corals, called stony corals, contain (and depend on) algae that need light to grow, so coral reefs grow only in clear water. The clearer the water, the taller and more productive the coral reef.

A paradox of the marine world is that clear water contains very little suspended algae, the first link in the marine food chain.Clear blue water, therefore, means the area is an ocean desert.Yet it’s this nutrient-poor water that bathes coral reefs, the most productive of all marine environments.

The abundant energy around coral reefs is based on the first steppingstone of life in the ocean: algae. On the reef, though, it’s the home gardens growing inside the corals’ bodies, and near the surface of their hard skeletons, that ignite the system.

But when it comes to productivity, the green water of Ban­de­ras Bay is no slouch. The olive-colored water means algae, and that means nutrition for tiny animals, and so on up the food web.

I can’t see the bottom when I go snorkeling here, but I know the fish and invertebrates are there. Besides hosting countless seabirds diving for fish all day, the bay coughs up some of its inhabitants, kindly leaving them on the beach for me to discover.

As I stroll along the dark sand, blotches of white are my clue that a goody has washed ashore. Last week, near a pile of rocks that extended into the bay, I came across a bunch of white porcupine puffer fish, all puffed up, all intact and all dead. I stopped counting at 13, wondering what had occurred that these fish all came to be stranded at the same spot at the same time.

"Tsunami!" I imagined the puffer fish dad of this extended family yelled when a big ship sped past.And instead of diving for cover, the poor puffers inflated themselves and rode the wake to their deaths.

Or not.That’s the fun of beachcombing. All the fish, invertebrates and man-made junk I find have stories, and since I will never know what they are, I make them up.

From fish vertebrae to spiny lobster molts to colorful squares of ceramic tile, I’m having a ball on the Puerto Vallarta beaches. Imagine how much fun I’m going to have when I get this boat going.

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Reach Susan Scott at www.susanscott.net.