I have paddled past Estero Americano several times, and paddled down the estero itself once. But I have never taken pictures of this seldom-seen coastline between Sonoma and Marin Counties. So I scheduled a BASK trip to paddle past here from Campbell Cove in Bodega Harbor to Miller Park inside Tomales Bay. I have heard other kayakers talk about the rock gardens in this area, which I wisely avoided on my first two trips when I had a lot less experience. Unfortunately, the swell at sea rose up to 15 feet off of Point Arena a few days before this trip. As I feared, the water only calmed down to 10 foot swell the morning of the trip. I sent email warning people about this the evening before but 4 people, besides myself, showed up at 8:00 AM at Miller Park.
We had to meet this early to avoid paddling out of Bodega harbor before the next maximum flood tide, and to get inside Tomales Bay before the maximum ebb tide. If we were late, both of these currents would be against us at the narrow entrances. Although the swell was high it had a long period, fourteen seconds, which would make for reasonably smooth paddling out on the ocean. We decided to do the trip under these conditions, but to give up on landing at the Estero Americana beach for lunch. Although the long wavelengths made the ocean manageable, the tall amplitude would crash violently on the beaches. We had calm flat water inside protected harbors at both ends to launch and land in. If we stayed away from the beaches, it would be a calm and easy trip. (Creepy music, famous last words).
We launched and paddled out of Bodega Harbor with no problems. I suggested that we paddle across to the end of Doran Beach so we could see what the waves were like there before getting into the rocky part of the shoreline. Then we turned south and approached Estero Americano where there was a large rock just offshore that looked calm enough most of the time to paddle around. Peter Degoey approached this first and was surprised by a large wave that broke around it. He paddled over this in time and decided to go the long way around the rock. I considered waiting for a calm time and zooming inside the rock. I had been complaining earlier that pointing my camera at a section of coast always collapsed the vector state and calmed down the water. I tried pointing my camera behind this rock as Roger arrived and headed behind it next. It didn't work this time.
While waiting for Roger to get into position for a picture, I noticed a large wave arriving. I dropped the camera and turned out to sea to plow over the wave. Once in motion I kept going and tried to zoom around the outside of the rock to catch a picture of Roger coming around the other side. I know Roger is a fast kayaker so I hurried and still expected him to get there ahead of me. So I was confused when I got there first and did not see him anywhere. Everyone else looked puzzled as well and all four of us bunched together as our eyes turned more and more often to the rough water behind the rock. I heard the loud booming crunch of a fiberglass boat against the shore before I finally saw Roger. He had apparently been surfed out of control and eventually out of his boat. When we finally saw him he was dragging his boat, between waves, up a small strip of beach away from a solid wall of rocky cliff.
While we waited, Roger spent entirely too much time on shore. If everything had been OK, he would have been back in the water instantly. He was walking around and carrying his boat, so we knew that he was in good shape physically. But he turned his boat over for a while to inspect the hull. It is recommended that you leave someone alone to rescue themselves in situations like this, rather than join them and get two kayaks into trouble instead of one. It is recommended that you develop the skills to rescue yourself and never rely on anyone else to save you. I knew that Roger was a very skilled kayaker and was probably the best qualified of all of us to launch a kayak under rough conditions like this. But I did consider going in for a landing and helping out if it looked necessary or if it took him too long to get going again.
Afterwards I got his version of what happened. He thought he had timed the large sets of waves and was safe going behind the rock. When he saw a three meter wave breaking over him, he broached and braced into it so hard that his head went under water, holding hs breath. The wave side-surfed him directly toward shore at full speed. He could not remember what the shore looked like here, so he came up for a breath of air and to look at where he was heading. What he saw was a sheer wall of rock 15 meters tall comming straight at him. He recalled the Tsunami Rangers recomendation to keep your hull between you and a rock. So he leanded back over hard putting his head inside the wave again but rotating the bottom of the boat up to face the cliff. The boat hit the rock wall with a sickening crunch, puting a crack along the keel. Then the wave pulled back dropping Roger and his boat onto a narrow sandy beach. Roger fell out of the boat and tried to pull it away from the cliff but it was full of water and would not budge. The next wave arrived and slamed the boat into the cliff, on the top side this time cracking the boat in several places in front of the cockpit. When that wave receeded, Roger rolled his boat over to dump the water out and started draging it allong the sand in the direction that looked like it lead to higher ground. A third wave came in and grabbed the boat out of his hands to smashed it into the cliff again. Cracks appeared behind the cockpit on this hit. After rolling it over to dump out a new load of water, Roger was finally able to carry the boat up above the waves and out of more trouble. This is when we caught our first glimpse of him on the shore.
The last trip I went on with Roger, I loaned him some duct tape to patch cracks in his other boat. As we started this trip, he gave me a small roll of tape to replace what he had borrowed. This small roll was tape wound around a small plastic bottle so it would take up less room than a whole roll of tape. I assumed this ment that he had made himself one of these small rolls, or had the original large roll in his emergency kit. Neither of these assumptions turned out to be correct. The boat Roger had just crunched was a Mariner II, a long touring boat. It had been seriously crunched last year in the Sea Gypsy Race when it was pitch-poled into the surf during a landing. Roger had never been happy with the way the kayak store had repaired it. Now all the "repaired" seams from that accident were burst open again. Plus some new cracks like the one along the keel and a crack along the gunwale seam.
Finally he moved his boat down to the water, got in for a launch, blasted out through some reasonably large waves, and came out way north of the rock. He was heading straight back to the harbor entrance and didn't even slow down much to talk to us. His boat was badly damaged and he feared it was taking on water. He assured us he would stay close to shore and land on Doran Beach if the boat did not remain seaworthy. He insisted we continue the trip without him. He left a note on Peter's car later so we found out that he did in fact make it back to his car OK. We continued on along the coastline. Someone joked that there had been five kayakers, one down and four more to go. (Maryly, Rachel, Peter, and myself).
With my more experienced eyes, I did see a lot of interesting rocks I must have paddled way around the last two times past here. As we passed Estero Americano and Estero de San Antonio I paddled close in to shore to take pictures. Everyone else stayed far from shore.
When I first described this trip to people, I mentioned that Dillon Beach was a possible place to bail out of the trip about 2/3rds of the way through. However, I did not consider this a viable option with rough surf like this. Next to Dillon Beach is an infamous sand bar in front of the entrance to Tomales Bay. I discovered this sand bar myself the first time I padded in the neighborhood. What I saw then was waves breaking in the middle of nowhere away from the beach. I avoided this spot at the time an later learned that many people have been killed here when the breaking waves rolled their motor-boats over. With the water close to the high tide, the sand bar was invisible but for the waves breaking over it. The 9 foot swell was rising up into impressive dumping waves that seemed to fill the entrance of the bay from Tomales Point to Dillon Beach. I was sure that there were calm channels through this but everyone else was skeptical. There was a swarm of jet ski's playing in this surf, driving up the face of the waves before they broke and leaping meters into the air, making things look even scarier. I had mentioned this sand bar to my fellow paddlers and suggested that we would have to work our way around it carefully. I expected the water to break over the sand bar, leave a calm channel along Dillon Beach, and then break again onto the beach. The last few times I had been past here I had been able to paddle along this calm beach channel.
On this day, however, the situation was different. It looked like the sand bar extended west and connected with the beach. There was no clear way to get into the beach channel without surfing over the sand bar or practically landing on the beach. I could see darker blue water on the other side of the bar but Peter claimed to see the large waves breaking all the way to the beach. I think he was seeing the distance foreshortened, seeing two sets of breakers and thinking they were one continuous break. Even if there was a channel, there was no easy way to get into it, so I suggested paddling towards Tomales Point and following the markers in through the deep water channel. One kayaker, Maryly, was low on energy, had very sore arms and neck muscles, and wanted to land at Dillon Beach. I tried to talk her into paddling across to look for the deep channel, but she would not. Even though it was less then two kilometers, she said that this distance would tire her out even more. If we failed to find a channel and turned back she would be totally exhausted which would make the surf landing that much more difficult.
After discussing various combinations of plans, we settled on this one: Rachel and I would escort Maryly to the beach. If the waves were not too rough looking, Rachel would paddle back out through them and continue the trip. Peter would wait out beyond the breakers for us to return. I promised Peter that I would come back. I had to, since I was the one with the key to the only car at our take-out spot in the bay. I tried to get Maryly and Rachel to paddle as far as possible west up the beach to get away from the sand bar. If we were knocked out of our boat by a wave breaking over the bar we would have to swim 200 meters or more. Farther north the first break was quite a bit closer to shore. Maryly wanted to turn in sooner, and Rachel kept drifting closer to shore as we headed west. Eventually a wave broke over the end of the sand bar onto Rachel and she was shucked out of her sit-inside kayak. She lost her paddle, for good unless someone finds it on the beach later and turns it in for the reward. She also had her contact lenses sucked off, so then she could not see her paddle, boat, or the shore very clearly. Fortunately she was in a wetsuit, paddle jacket, and PFD. Two kayakers down, three more to go.
After the set of waves that dumped on Rachel, the water looked calm so I finally suggested that Maryly and I turn towards shore. Our luck held out and we paddled over the end of the sand bar with no breakers and made it into a choppy but much calmer area. Maryly paddled past Rachel and made sure she was OK, then continued straight in. Maryly made it most of the way and was finally dumped off of her sit-on- top kayak by a breaker close to shore. She and all her equipment made it OK. Three kayakers down, two more to go.
Rachel's hard-shell sit inside boat had fore and aft watertight compartments. It was so buoyant that it had rolled over on these compartments and dumped most of the water out of the cockpit. It was floating upside down on its bow and stern with the cockpit open and just above the water level. Very impressive. I was able to roll it right- side up without spilling more than a few liters of water back in. Then I herded it back to its owner. I was afraid to attach my boat to it in the surf, so I pushed it with my prow and turned it in the right direction then shoved it from time to time while paddling past it. While I was doing this, I heard a whistle blow a few times out to sea. I figured that this was Peter trying to warn us about big waves coming. I looked up but all of the waves were breaking over the sand bar, making the water very choppy but never causing me any problems. I offered to help Rachel with a paddle-float rescue, but this was when I learned that she had lost her paddle. I offered to loan her my spare paddle but she refused, suggesting that she was just going to hold on to the boat and swim it in until the waves pulled the stern toggle out of her hand. I was actually relieved that she didn't want my spare paddle, because it was inside my boat. Opening my cockpit while in the surf would have been a risky thing to do.
Things seemed calm and reasonably under control, so I told Rachel I would go do a sweep looking for her paddle. I hadn't gotten very far when I saw Peter only about 50 meters away. He was pumping water out of his boat with a bilge pump. Then I saw that his paddle was attached to his boat on one end and a paddle float on the other. He had apparently been knocked out of his boat by the same large set of waves that swamped Rachel, had spent 20 minutes in the water collecting his equipment, and couldn't see any of us the whole time. Four kayakers down, one more to go. He didn't blow his whistle until late in this stage of things because he forgot that he had it on his PFD. Actually, he wasn't even wearing his PFD at the time the wave hit! He had taken it off and stuffed it under some bungie cords on the back of his boat, where it got swept away by the wave.
Peter had also attended a recent BASK meeting where I had brought up the safety issue of paddle leashes. The general consensus at that meeting was that paddle leashes are likely to wrap around your neck and strangle you, so always take it off in surf. My dissenting opinion was that this was a low probability event that was unlikely to happen with a leash, while loosing control of your equipment was a very high probability event that a leash could prevent. Rachel never put hers on, lost her paddle for good and had to swim 200 meters to shore. Peter went with the majority opinion and had removed his leash as we approached Dillon Beach. So he spent those 20 minutes in the water swimming around. Collecting his PFD and putting it on, finding his paddle and swimming it back to his boat. At one point he saw a wave breaking and reached out to grab his boat before it got swept away. He accidentally grabbed it by the rudder cable, a thin piece of braided stainless steel wire, and cut the palm of his hand badly. All of this could have been prevented (except for the PFD part) by a paddle leash. Even Rachel and Peter were not convinced by their experiences. Maryly tried to buy a paddle leash later at a kayak store and they talked her out of it when she mentioned surf. I'm still the only one.
I guessed at some of this when I saw Peter pumping out his boat. I looked away for a minute, and when I looked back I saw Peter paddling away from me and back out to sea. Apparently he never saw me looking at him. He had been pushed over the sandbar by the waves and as I watched he paddled back over it again and out to sea. I cringed and wished I could have stopped him to suggest that he stay in the relatively calm water or head for shore. I almost hoped that a big wave would come and push him back to me, but he made good his escape. His self-rescue convinced me he was in capable hands (his own), so I went back to Rachel and stayed near her for a while. She lost control of her boat in a breaker closer to shore, so I surfed in for a landing and yelled at the little kids that were lining up to get their arms and legs broken while "helping" to catch the boat. I told their father that an uncontrolled kayak can come in with thousands of pounds of force. Standing in front of one was like looking down the barrel of a loaded shotgun. Then I carefully waded around BEHIND the loose kayak and pushed it up onto shore. A surfer came by and helped me roll the water out of it and carry it up onto dry sand. Rachel waded to shore a few minutes later to be greeted by Maryly.
I could see Peter out at sea. He was farther west than any of the rest of us had gone, in the spot I would have chosen to land from. I figured I would not have much trouble launching through the surf to meet him. But first I rested for a minute and ran back to the restroom at Dillon Beach to empty my bladder. I waved at Peter, figuring he would recognize my green PFD, and wished I had my bright yellow helmet on to make myself more recognizable. I put the helmet back on and plowed my kayak back out through the waves, making it in one attempt with only a few blasts of cold salty water in my face. I got to within 50 meters of Peter again, parallel to him in the waves. To my surprise he was slowly paddling towards shore and didn't see me until I blew my whistle to get his attention. He hadn't seen any of us since when Rachel was swamped, and felt very alone and cold out there. He was in fact starting a landing when I got his attention. We talked about continuing with Plan B, and paddling over to Tomales Point to the deep channel. But he was very cold from his immersion in the water, spooked by all his close calls, and decided he should land and wait for a ride with everyone else.
So I escorted Peter in through the surf and made another landing with him. Peter did a wonderful job of bracing into the breakers and side-surfing in several stages. He made it all the way to shore completely in control and made a gentle landing on the sand. I failed to turn sideways in time on the last wave. The prow of my boat hit the sand, twisted the boat over and rolled me into the water. Five kayakers down, no more to go. Well, I was probably not as traumatized by finally getting wet to match everybody else. I volunteered to hit the bottom and let the wave knock the kayak over me, then stood up behind it and pushed it the rest of the way to shore. Peter decided that the waves looked a lot less threatening from the beach.
It occurred to me later that one reason everyone (but me) had trouble keeping track of each other was the fact that everyone (but me) wore corrective glasses. Rachel had lost her contact lenses in the turbulent water under the wave. Maryly and Peter had their glasses firmly attached with neoprene straps behind their heads, but after immersion the lenses were spotted with salt water that interfered with clear vision. Even Roger, who was not there for half of the excitement, wears glasses. I was the only one who could see what was going on. "In the Land of the Blind, the one-eyed man is King".
With Everyone safely on shore, I was free to revert to my original Plan A: Get between the beach breakers and the sand bar and follow that channel into the bay. When I told Peter this, he was concerned that I would be going in solo. He offered to walk along the shore to make sure I made it into Tomales Bay. I jumped back into the surf and started angling down the beach in the soup zone close to shore. There were kids playing at the edge of the water, so I angled farther and farther out to make sure I wouldn't get surfed into them. I went a little too far out and got knocked over by a large breaker. I held onto my paddle with leash, pulled by boat back to me and climbed back on. When I got under way again, I saw that I was just about into the calm channel behind the sandbar, so I paddled over one last mild set of breakers and started zooming down the beach. Occasional breakers did come through this zone, but they were easy to climb over. Occasionally a wave broke in this zone, but they never tried to surf me very far and were easy to brace into. This did keep me so busy looking out to sea that I didn't try to keep track of Peter on the shore. I went so fast that he was unable to jog fast enough to keep up with me. He thinks the ebb tide eddy current had already started up and was helping me along.
When I got to the end of the beach, I found Rachel and Maryly there waving at me. I stopped for a short landing to tell them what happened to Peter. They had walked all the way to the entrance looking for the lost paddle, but had never seen a hint of it. The water here was calm near the mouth of Tomales Bay, but the tide had turned and the ebb current was starting out. I paddled around the spit into a current that seemed to be getting stronger by the second. The water near the shore was starting to stir up little tornadoes of sand off the bottom. I tried moving farther from shore and found a current so strong that it pushed me backwards faster than I could paddle. I turned back for a landing and walked along the shore pulling the boat in the edge of the water behind me. There is a sandy beach here all the way to Lawson's Landing, but the bay soon got wide enough to slow down and I paddled out across the water. I tried to stay west of the center to catch an eddy current, but instead found another channel of water running out, like a river looping out from the middle of the bay. I was able to make progress over this anyway and eventually found slower shallow water close to shore.
I had seen what looked like a bunch of birds in the shallow water ahead of me and closer to shore for some time, but didn't pay very much attention. As I got close to them, they finally noticed me and the water suddenly exploded into violent motion. The mud suddenly erupted a hundred shiny black bodies that all tried to get away from me at once just under the surface. What I had thought was a bunch of birds was a pod of harbor seals lying in shallow water with only their heads and tails above the surface. They calmed down after the initial surprise, but all the heads watched warily as I paddled past them and around the next point.
The whole trip across the bay I had calm flat water and a very slight wind at my back. It was enough to counteract the mild current if I stopped paddling, but not enough to really push me very fast. I was able to paddle as fast as the wind, so I warmed up rapidly in the afternoon sun. When I stopped paddling to rest, the breeze caught up with me and cooled me off a little. I cut straight across the shallow water, my paddles occasionally striking bottom, and made good time back to Miller Park. I threw my stuff in the bus, tied my kayak on top, and drove off without removing my wetsuit to rescue everyone else from the beach as soon as possible. Dillon Beach closed while we were still loading up all the kayaks. Maryly's short sit-on top just fit inside and left room for two people in back, two up front. The rest of the kayaks stacked on top.
The trip back to Bodega Bay we talked about kayak safety and what we could have done differently. While being lost and alone in the surf, Peter had watched his equipment drifting away from him, and almost came around to my opinion of paddle leashes. Next trip out he will have a spare paddle on his boat. I'll bet that he is never going to take his PFD off in the ocean again. My assumption is always that everything not firmly tied to me or my boat is in imminent danger of being swept away and lost. So even when I take my PFD or hat off to go diving, I always immediately attach them firmly to the boat. While tumbling under the wave, Rachel was horrified by the power of the wave. She was convinced that a paddle leash would never have held and decided one was not worth the risk.
It occurred to me that I should have considered ways to get Rachel to shore sooner. She could have grabbed onto the stern toggle on Maryly's boat for a quicker ride. Rachel would have acted as a sea anchor and stabilized Maryly's landing. I actually practiced this maneuver with my brother Paul once. Maryly was interested in knowing what else she could have done. I reminded everyone that the best course of action is often not to dash back into the waves to try and help someone. This can result in yet another person (yourself) getting in trouble. We had correctly stayed away from the cliff while Roger rescued himself, standing by to call for serious help if it was necessary.
After everyone got their boats back on their own cars, Peter and I stopped to have dinner at a seafood (what else?) restaurant in Bodega. Peter said that he thought Rachel was really bummed about loosing her paddle. We looked at my TideLog to see when would be a good time to go look for it. We discovered that all the minus tides for the next week were happening late at night or early in the morning. In fact, a minus tide was happening right about the time we finished dinner. So I drove back to Dillon Beach to try walking the beach one more time. First I tried calling Lawson's Resort and Lawson's Landing to try to get permission to park at their beach. I didn't contact anyone so I drove to Lawson's Cafe and found two people just about done closing up. One of them turned out to be Stan Lawson, the guy who sent me email about my journal entry describing Dillon Beach on the WEB. He remembered that said, "Oh you are the guy who called Dillon Beach a Shitty Little Town". I cringed and replied that was NOT what I said. (I had called it a "depressing little town"). But he was still civil enough to tell me where I could park my car near the beach where it wouldn't get towed. And he said he would contact me or Rachel if the paddle showed up on the beach.
I walked the entire length of the beach, from the rocks on the west to the opening of Tomales Bay on the east. In the light of my big Maglight flashlight I saw a lot of seaweed, pieces of wood, tennis shoes, and one truck tire left on the sand by the retreating tide. But I never saw the paddle.
