The waves have been fairly high the last few weeks, so I have not gone out kayaking for some time. Marty was up this weekend, we had no other plans, and aside from the big swells at sea, it looked like a gorgeous day. So we went out into Drakes Estero, where we have been planning to do some bird watching, and the big waves would not be a problem. I had assumed that we could paddle from the canoe access at Johnson's Oyster Beds, down to the mouth of the estero, and across the Estero de Limantour to the marshy area Marty had liked the look of when she picked me up from an ocean kayak trip recently. But when we got to the launch spot, there was a class of 20 kayaks setting up to go. When they headed down the east shore towards the ocean, we sort of gravitated to the west side and went up one of the side bays to stay away from them. Also, Drakes Estero is a lot larger than I had imagined from glancing at the map. From Johnson's oysters to Drakes bay, the estero is almost 6 kilometers long, with three other side bays, not counting Estero de Limantour. It's going to take several trips out here to explore it all. It's so big, we spent the whole afternoon and didn't even see the breakers in the bay, although we could hear them in the distance. We figured that every one of these side bays would have muddy shallows, with reeds and birds, and it didn't matter where we went.
As we headed out, we saw one of Johnson's oyster beds: A set of piers in the middle of the water with wooden rails between them, and hundreds of wires hanging down across the rails. I once read, in "Chesapeake" by James Michner, that the oystermen in the Chesapeake seed their oysters into the mud, then dredge them up out of the mud later. The exact location of each oysterman's mud beds is a closely guarded secret, and they sneak out when no-one else is watching to scatter their oyster sets. As a result, all the beds probably overlap, and when they catch someone else on "their" piece of the bay, they go after each other with shotguns. How uncivilized. Out here in the civilized west, oysters are glued in rings on scallop shells, stacked vertically 6 inches apart on long wires. A spot of mud that would hide only one Chesapeake Bay oyster can support dozens of oysters in these vertical layers. And they don't have to dredge the bottom to collect the harvest. In bodies of water where more than one company grows oysters, the piers or floats are visible above water, and you can tell where everyone's property is. They have been raising oysters this way for over a hundred years here, but the oystermen in the Chesapeake are still shooting at each other over blank stretches of water. Unfortunately, the California water is too cold for oyster sets to start. They must be started in warmer water and then transported here. They used to be shipped overland from the east coast in barrels of water on trains. I assume they come in refrigerated trucks these days. With a moderately low tide, the top two rows of oysters were just visible in the water.
Down the west side of the estero was a low cliff, and we saw a few kingfishers, and a pair of Kestrels. Not to mention the usual number of pelicans, cormorants on every stick in the water, and of course gulls. As we rounded Bull Point, there was a snowy egret with black legs and yellow feet, standing on a rock on the point. We managed to drift past him without disturbing him. From here, it didn't look like there was a side bay here, but I kept paddling towards the low beach that seemed to stretch across the place the bay was supposed to be. I hoped that there would be at least a narrow access to Creamery Bay. Sure enough, the lack of an opening was an optical illusion, and when we got there, the little side bay was wide open for us to paddle into. The afternoon wind was starting to pick up, and we were paddling almost straight north into it. We stopped behind a short east-west cliff to rest in the wind shadow, then headed the rest of the way north to the shallow tip of Creamery Bay. I expected the bay to get shallow in a smooth way, but instead the bottom was scalloped. My paddles would hit bottom, then sink into deep water again. Through the water, we could just make out this random pattern in the bottom, like large frozen waves of mud. Eventually, the canoe started sliding over the tops of these, and we decided to stop. This bay did not have a reedy marsh at the end, and the birds could see us coming from a long ways off. Most of them flew off before we got a good look at them. We let the wind blow us back, and ate some of our picnic lunch while we drifted. Sitting in the canoe, we couldn't face each other, it didn't even feel like we were eating together. So we went back to the cliff that had the wind shadow, beached the canoe and finished lunch there. Afterwards we walked along the beach, looked at all the footprints of birds, deer, and raccoons in the sand, and tried to guess what the old pier blocks on the beach used to hold up. There were lots of oyster shells in the sand, which could not have gotten here naturally, since they never grew here on their own. Eventually Marty discovered that the old roadbed along the cliff used to be paved with oyster shells. This road was eroding onto the beach to create the situation we saw in the sand.
When we headed back, we found 3 snowy egrets on Bull Point. One of them did a little dance in front of another while we drifted past. Was it a sexual display, or a show of aggression? As we started north from the point, I saw a shadow clearly on the bottom ahead of us. Just as I figured out that I was looking at a shark, it got spooked by my paddle and zoomed away in a puff of mud. Marty only got a glimpse of it. It was maybe 60 cm long, probably the largest shark that can live in these shallow waters. We went across the bay and headed up the east side, hoping the wind would be less but finding it stronger. In the past, Marty has been happy to let me paddle her around in the canoe. To tell the truth, with the steering problems that this kevlar canoe has always had, it was often easier to paddle it alone than to have someone "help". To keep it on a straight course, I would have to constantly change my rhythm, and this would clash with the second paddler. Or they would make matters worse by paddling on the wrong side at the wrong moment and helping this silly canoe to start one of it's rotating movements. But now that we have the new skeg installed, this canoe will paddle in a straight line without constant correction. So Marty and I were able to paddle together effectively for the first time in all the years we've had it. With two people paddling, we zoomed up the bay against the wind, and made it back in time to buy some seafood before Johnson's closed.
