Just outside the opening of Tomales Bay, there is a small town named Dillon Beach. Right next to the town is the namesake beach, and it is a very nice spot. The beach is usually sheltered from the swells at sea by Tomales Point and Bodega Bay, so the surf is mild. The sandy beach extends several kilometers from the town down through the opening of Tomales Bay. The waves get milder as you walk in that direction, while on the north end the waves are often large enough for surfers. The correct type of water for every member of the family to play in. The only fly in this pastoral picture is the parking situation.
There are three parts to the town: A newer subdivision up on the cliffs to the north, a depressing trailer park to the south, and the older section in the middle in front of the beach. This older section of town was probably laid out as a beach resort community, with narrow roads, small houses on small lots, and insufficient room for parking even one car per residence. Because there is a nice beach nearby, the residents have apparently fought a long battle with inconsiderate beach visitors. Every driveway has a sign on it saying "Private Road!", or "No Parking!". The local store has signs every 5 feet saying "Customer Parking Only!", "No Beach Parking!". To the locals and the regular visitors to the town I guess these signs have become invisible. But when I first drove around the town, I felt decidedly unwelcome. The solution to the parking woes is Lawson's beach parking.
The Lawson's maintain a large parking lot at the beach and charge $5.00 per car to park there. This is about the same as many public beaches, but it is probably the only privately owned beach access in California that is open to the public. There is still a type of person who will refuse to pay to park at the beach, so I assume the battle between these beach visitors and the residents will continue. My problem with the parking lot is that it doesn't open until around 10:00 in the morning. I have arrived there several times early in the morning to go kayaking , and found the parking lot chained shut. I would gladly have paid $5.00 to use the parking lot and the rest-rooms before I paddled out, but even the rest-rooms were barred and locked shut. Since the wind usually comes up in the afternoon, kayaking is best done in the morning, and the earlier the start the better. The locked up parking lot in the morning makes this beach unfriendly to kayakers.
When I showed up here the first time, I had to go to Lawson's Landing south of town by the depressing trailer park. They charge $7.00 at the gate to get into the area, then you drive a kilometer south where they charge an additional $5.00 to launch a boat. Nobody was quite sure if a kayak counted as a boat or not. I got tired of getting "Don't Know" as the answer to that and every other question, and paid $5.00 rather than wait for someone who knew anything to get up in the morning. The landing turned out to be a graded gravel beach with a large all-terrain-vehicle that would push your boat trailer out into the water as part of the launch fee. Needless to say, this was totally wasted on me. I walked out into the water with my kayak, put it down and sat down in it.
I had arrived late, got my car stuck in a sand dune, dug back out with some advice from a local "old salt", and now I had to travel an extra three kilometers (round trip) to go back past the beach I wanted to launch from anyway. The beach parking lot was open by the time I paddled past it, and I was in a foul mood. But I kept going because I was determined to try this area out. Besides, it's the gateway to the northern tip of Tomales Point and Point Reyes National Seashore; I'll have to come back here one day as part of that trip.
By the time I hit the water it was a bright, sunny, late morning and I did not have any sunscreen. I hid under my hat and sunglasses and headed north for the rocky part of the shore north of the beach, hoping that the wisps of fog I saw would move in. The fog did come in and block out the sun for a while but before the trip was over the sun came back out and I peeled my suit down to the waist to cool off and got a sunburn on my arms. Just north of Dillon Beach, the cliffs rise straight out of the water, with a row of big rocks in front of them. But the swells were breaking between these rocks, and I was unable to paddle between them and the cliffs. Either it was just the wrong time of the tide or the water there is very shallow, making the waves break early.
I found one interesting rocky outcropping where I could get close to shore. There is this ring of large rocks sticking out of the cliff with a shallow area inside them. I paddled inside this and found that the swells lost most of their energy getting into the ring. Even though the water was so shallow that I bumped my kayak over some of the smaller rocks, there was little danger of the breakers catching me. Back out of the magic ring, I kept going north to the Estero De Americano: A muddy creek which marks the Sonoma/Marin border. It actually had large gravel dunes along the shore and didn't look like the creek water made it directly into the ocean. Behind the dunes there was a wide valley marking the location of the creek. This is the northern limit of my quest to paddle past the entire Marin County shoreline.
Despite my late start, the normal prevailing wind did not come up to blow me back. Without a wind I paddled all the way back into Tomales Bay on my own power. There is a sandbar underwater near the mouth of the bay and along the beach. Waves break over this, even though you cannot see the bar until you are right on top of it. Going north I skirted around these scary mid-water breakers but coming straight back, I paddled right over it and risked getting caught in the breakers. When I mentioned Tomales Bay to a boating friend of mine (Lyle Ryan), he told me that this sand bar is notorious, and boaters die there every year when they get swamped by breaking waves. Marty and I also found out that our partners in the house in Berkeley (Ez and Michael) almost drowned there once. They were dropped off on that sand bar at low tide to dig clams. When the tide started to come back in, their friends in the boat got swept away by the current and couldn't paddle against it to come pick the clam diggers back up. They were standing in waist-deep water in the middle of the bay before someone in a power boat came by and rescued them.
My timing was poor, and by the time I got to the mouth of Tomales Bay, the tide was in full ebb. I had to fight my way around Sand Point against the current to get back to the landing. There were people walking along the beach and I could paddle just a little faster than them by working as hard as I could. Once back to the "boat ramp" I got everything back into the bus and headed around the rest of the loop to get out. The kilometer between the gate and the boat ramp is an expanse of (mostly empty) RV camping sites covered with 50% green grass and 50% cow chips. But near the boat launch there are a lot of permanent mobile homes, campers and trailers. Some of the lots have actual RV's that were driven here, parked and lived in until the tires went flat and rotted off. It tells a depressing story of the sad end to a traveling lifestyle. Some of these places have tarps propped off the side of the mobile homes, covering half of their possessions. Rusting away under inadequate protection from the elements. But the most depressing part of the tour was the huge expanse of cleared and graveled land at the end of the loop of the road. They are prepared for even more sad trailers to take up permanent residence here.