There are lots of small sport fishing power boats zipping around the Sea of Cortez, taking what few fish remain in these waters. Mind you, some of our best boating friends are power boaters, but we prefer staying out of the way of the smaller, high speed sport craft. So we sort of cringed when a 26-foot sportfisher pulled in next to us at the dock at Marina Santa Rosalia.
This little power boat was a bit different, though, in that it had a longer bowsprit and a higher flybridge than most sportfishers its size. The flybridge supports looked heavily reinforced. Also, it had 5 people on board — 3 of whom were women. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but in our experience it’s unusual to have 3 women sport-fishing on a 26-foot power boat with 2 other people. Space aboard is a little tight, don’t you know. 
What made this particular little power boat even more unusual, were the 2 crossbows they had mounted in the cockpit by the companionway:
What fish could these 5 people possibly be hunting with crossbows?! We were baffled.
We eventually learned that they weren’t fishing at all. The 2 men aboard were the skipper and his mate, and the 3 women were marine biologists, researching various whale populations throughout the Sea of Cortez. They use the crossbows to shoot the target whales with an arrow with a specialized tip that punches a small sample of skin and blubber out of the whale. The arrow is so lightweight that upon impact with the whale, it bounces off with its tissue sample; the arrow is fitted with a high-visibility float (basically, a Styrofoam sleeve painted in Day-Glo colors) so that the biologists simply retrieve it from the water. They told us the whales do not seem overly annoyed by the procedure, and oftentimes hang around their boat to see what else is going on. The biologists preserve the tissue samples and analyze them later for any information they can get, including the target whale’s overall health, diet, and even possible skin changes suggesting cancer from too much UV exposure. These 3 marine biologists were kind enough to show several of us on the docks their photos of whales and what species of cetaceans live in or visit the Sea of Cortez. (Answer: more species than you would expect – including blue whales and orca, 
like these orca in the pic on the right, that we met in the middle of the Sea, crossing from Santa Rosalia to San Carlos on the Mexican mainland: ).
I digress here to point out that these women are using crossbows to punch blubber out of very large critters that are not standing still, from the pitching bow of a boat half the size (or smaller) of the target beast. That takes the hand-eye coordination of an Olympic biathlete, I tell you what. Imagine what it must be like for them to describe their jobs to people they’ve just met: “Oh, you’re in sales. How interesting….Me? Yeah, I’m a biologist. Half the year I’m at the university in London, but the other half I wear shorts, get some sun, and ride a boat around Mexico shooting whales with crossbows.”
The moral of this story is, not all sport fishing boats are alike. If you ever see one named “Cicimar XV” with a bunch of women on board holding crossbows, give them a big wave and a howdy from us. But first, make sure they see you’re not a beluga.
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