Keith Hutchins is a friend of mine who is (among other things) a naturalist who works at the Bird Rescue Center in Santa Rosa. He has the poster for the Estero Americano on his living room wall, but he has never been there himself. So ever since we paddled down the Limantour Estero in 1997 we have talked about going down the Americano together. Every year there is a canoe and kayak race down this Estero, called the Cow Patty Pageant, and this year I convinced Keith to join me in my Kevlar canoe on this race as a way to finally get Keith out to this beautiful place.
To make sure Keith had time to slow down and watch the wildlife, I talked him into doing a practice run three days before the race. This turned out to be a Wednesday morning between storms in the middle of a very wet month. The five day forcast had predicted Wednesday would be partially sunny and we chose this moring hoping the predictions would come true. The Estero Americano is an amazingly flat body of water that somehow winds its way through the costal hills for six or seven miles inland. The tide comes all the way in and back out again, leaving parts high and muddy. You can get stuck in the mud if you don’t plan your trip well. The water from the last storm had not drained away, however, and the Estero was still over its banks. The current under the bridge looked strong, but I figured we would be able to paddle against it on the way back, so we started off. We turned around at one point and paddled upstream for a minute just to make sure we could do it.
We had the skeg in my canoe down to make it track better, so we had to stay in the main channel while shallow water spread out all around us in the first few miles. At one point this shallow water started making a loud roaring sound west of us. Keith didn’t know what this sound meant, and I had to shout “RAIN!” over the noise just before the wall of falling water swept over us. We were expecting wet weather and were well dressed for it, Keith in polypro and hooded rain jacket and I in farmer john wetsuit, nylon jacket and felt hat. It only rained hard for a few minutes but it was enough to put an inch of water in the bottom of the canoe. I used a bilge pump to spit most of it over the coaming. The rain soon stopped and the sky partially cleared up as predicted. The rest of the day was very nice with periods of bright warm sunshine that made us take off our jackets.
Keith was not sure he was up to a twelve mile paddle in a canoe and at first didn’t believe the Estero was really that long. On the map it is only three miles to the ocean “as the crow flies”. I described fractal curves to Keith and explained how there could be an infinately long winding river in that finite trip to the ocean. When The Estero looped back at one place and we saw our cars getting closer for a while Keith became a beleiver. As we left the road behind, Keith was amazed at how beautiful and remote this estero was. He was shamed that he had never been to such a wonderful place even though it was only an hour drive from his house in Santa Rosa. He resolved to come back, in better weather, with his girfriend Gail. Away from the narrow channel under the bridge the current was barely nodicable but we took our time and didn’t work very hard on the six mile trip out. Despite this lazy attitude we made it to the ocean in under two hours.
The ocean was very rough, of cource, and we stayed well away from the waves. The Lazy Estero sped up again and roared out to meet the salty water through a gap in the sandy spit. We landed on the back of the spit well away from the current and spent an hour exploring the beach and eating an early lunch. Ours were the only footprints on the sand and we combed the beach looking for interesting things washed up by the recent storms. I found several bait containers that had broken loose from crab traps. And then we found one crab trap almost intact sitting half way up the beach! These things are made of iron, lead, and stainless steel so it is difficult to imagine how one got washed UP the beach by any storm. My best hypothesis is that its rope got progressively more tangled up, shortening the distance between the float and the trap. Eventually the float was able to pick the trap up and let a wave push it up onto the beach. However, when we found the trap sitting in the sand, the rope was broken! A float with a tangled ball of rope was washed up nearby.
When we started back up the Estero we worked harder than we did on the trip out. As a result we made it back to the bridge in an hour and a half, about the same time we took going down stream. The Cow Patty Pageant is usually scheduled on a low tide, to force the particpants to get out and drag their boats through the mud in the shallow parts of the Estero. So when we got back to the bend in the creek where we were close to our cars, we got out and slid the canoe over the wet muddy grass and took a short cut. Considering the tounge- in-cheek slog-through-the-mud attitude of the promoters, we figured this would be a legal manouver on the official day of the race. By the time we go back to the bridge the water had dropped over a foot. The lack of rain had allowed the water to run off but a low tide was also approaching. We had no problems bucking the current and going through the narrows under the bridge and back to our cars.
Three days later, the Cow Patty Pageant was canceled due to bad weather. Some of the roads were closed due to flooding, and only a dozen people were able to show up. The water was back up to the level Keith and I had seen on Wednesday. It was raining heavily with no suggestion of letting up. And a strong wind was blowing from the east. This wind from and unusual direction would have combined with the current to make the paddle back up the Estero difficult. As everyone got back in their cars, a rumble of thunder convinced me that the decision to cancel was a correct one.
