From the road, Pichilingue looks fine.

Turquoise water. Desert mountains. Families on the sand. The ferry traffic going by. You would not know, standing there with a cold drink, what is sitting on the bottom twenty feet offshore.

I do. I have been looking at it for nine years.

Fishing line wrapped where the seahorses live. Plastic bottles in the rocks. Beer cans worked down into the sand. After a storm the bottom looks like the beach emptied its pockets and never came back for them. There is no toilet block that works the way a public beach needs one to work. No central place for the trash to go. The little launch the local boats use has taken a beating. Hurricanes do not ask permission. And every weekend, Mexican families, kids, and visitors still come, because it is their beach. It should be.

Richard and I made a simple promise out here. If no one else was going to start on Pichilingue, we would.

So we did. We stopped swimming past the junk. If it was on our dive, it came up. Nine years of that. Not a campaign. A habit. The same way you do not leave a mess in someone else’s kitchen.

This year we put a number on it. DiversInnMX has committed $10,000 of our own money to the continued care of Pichilingue. Debris off the bottom. Markers and buoys that stay where they belong. A watch on the seahorses and the rest of what lives there. Repair where the reef has been knocked around. The unglamorous work that keeps a public beach from sliding.

We adopted the site under PADI AWARE’s Adopt the Blue program, and we opened a fundraiser in Richard’s name so other people can stand in it with us:

https://donate.padiaware.org/fundraisers/richardmusselman/save-pinchilingue-beach

I will be straight about that page. The goal on it is bigger than what we are asking any one person to give. We already put our $10,000 on the table. What we need from you is company. A little money. A pair of hands. A survey dive logged the right way, so the trash we pull is counted and not just remembered.

If you dive with us, you are already in it. Small groups, the Sea of Cortez, and a boat that does not motor off and leave the line behind. If you want to do more than ride along, come do a Dive Against Debris survey dive with us, or a clean-up day, or take the Dive Against Debris or AWARE Shark Conservation specialty while you are here. The survey is the part that matters to the record. Beach bags are good. The count underwater is what PADI AWARE can actually use.

We also started Estrella de Cinco Puntos, a Mexican non-profit, for the work that belongs on land as much as underwater. Schools. Public talks. Water reuse. Reserve clean-ups. University students who should be out here learning the bay they live next to. A PADI AWARE grant application for the beach work went in once. We are revising it and sending it again. Waiting on a grant is not the same as waiting to start. We already started.

Healthy water is not a slogan on our wall. It is the reason anyone books the boat. If Pichilingue goes, a piece of La Paz goes with it. The families on that sand are not guests in someone else’s park. This is home.

Come dive it with us. Or send the fundraiser to someone who loves this bay and has not seen the bottom yet.

I will be on the boat. Bring gloves.

Kristi Musselman
Co-owner, DiversInnMX
La Paz, Baja California Sur