My dad recently had knee surgery but has recovered enough that he agreed to go camping with me. I figured I could combine this with the last unexplored (by me) stretch of Mendocino County. We drove up to Manchester State Beach on Saturday afternoon. Taking our time, we stopped at the Point Arena Lighthouse which I would be paddling around on the next day. Dad's knee was working well enough to climb up the 145 steps to the top of the lighthouse where they let you walk around the old Frenel lens array. This array is eight feet tall, and is like a wonderful sculpture of bent glass prisms that fills an entire room. I was glad that dad was in good enough shape to get to experience it. From the windows of the lighthouse I could see some of the rocks I would be traveling behind and an arch just north of the lighthouse. The water under the arch looked rough but passable.
We reserved a spot at the campground (Manchester is first-come- first-served with no advanced reservations allowed). Dad was not up to hiking into the environmental campground area so we set up the tent in the car-camping area. There was time, however, to drive down to Alder Creek and go for a short walk on the beach to collect driftwood and look at the waves to check out the kayak launching possibilities. The waves were a lot rougher than the last time I launched here. The large waves broke very violently far from shore and the "permanent" rip current I had launched in last time seemed to be gone. I hoped that the waves would be milder in the morning when I planed to launch just after low tide. We went back to our camp and BBQ'ed some fresh salmon and grilled some vegetables for dinner. I cooked enough salmon to save some of it for lunch the next day after my paddle.
In the night I could hear large waves booming up and down the beach. However by morning the sound seemed to come only from the south. My spirits rose because I would be launching from the north end of the beach. Then my spirits fell when I saw that the waves at Alder Creek were not much better than the evening before. I resigned myself to getting wet and got ready to launch over the rough waves. I jumped in and rode over the soupy breakers close to shore. This allowed me to stay rested and around 50 meters from shore while I waited for a window in the larger waves. I saw an opportunity and started out, but a wave broke too close in front of me and surfed the kayak backwards out of control. Trying to paddle over the breaker, I rolled over and got drenched, as predicted. But now that I was wet the waves could no longer threaten me with that and I felt even more confident. I tried a second time but was rejected by the sea again, surfed backwards, and rolled over off my boat. On the third attempt I saw a calm set of waves and made an extra effort to make it over the last breaker without getting surfed back. Then I relaxed and just paddled calmly but rapidly out to sea and made it just as a set of very large waves came in and threatened to break far from shore. But I was out to sea and heading south, successfully launched and on my way. Despite the conditions and the two failed attempts I was not exhausted like many of my previous surf launches. All my surf launch practice is paying dividends!
A few minutes later I saw some black shapes moving in the water ahead of me. Something in my mind said "cetacean!" and I wondered if it could be a late migrating gray whale. (I had seen one from the beach right here earlier in the year). As I got closer I discovered it was not a whale but it was a pod of cetaceans: white-sided dolphins to be exact! For the next hour I caught glimpses of these dolphins over and over again as they traveled down the beach at about the same speed as my boat. They never got close enough for me to take their picture on this trip. I kept my eyes open looking for them and at one point saw something move under the boat. It looked too light to be one of the dolphins. Then the water boiled in front of me as whatever-it-was noticed me and was startled into turning around and swimming back past the kayak again. On this pass it was close enough to the surface for the dorsal fin to stick out of the water (just like in the movies!). And I recognized the squarish nose of a SHARK! It only looked a little over a meter long so I was not scared at all, in fact I was ecstatic at finally seeing this rare animal in the open ocean! It was scared of me and zoomed away. This shark was gray with some white, without the dark spots of a leopard shark, possibly a young great white, but most likely a salmon shark.
Half way down Manchester Beach I passed the AT&T transpacific fiber optic submarine cable station. Two fiber optic cables come to shore here. One, named TPC-4, goes to Japan with a side branch to Canada. The other, HAW-4/TPC-3, runs to Hawaii. When I first set my brother Ralph up with an internet account I mentioned something to him about fiber optic cables across all the oceans. Ralph expressed disbelief that it was even possible to run cable across the Pacific. I did a search and found a map on the WEB showing half a dozen cables that run across the Pacific. Since then I read a very interesting article by Neal Stephenson in Wired Magazine about submarine cables in the digital age. I was intrigued that I paddled over two of them on this morning. I wondered if I could knock on their door and get a tour of the facilities one day.
About an hour after my launch I made it past the long Manchester beach and approached Point Arena. Through my binoculars I could not see dad in the lighthouse parking lot. Then I realized that the lighthouse would not open until 10:00 AM, 30 minutes from now. Dad is good at talking his way into places like this, and I did see some PG&E trucks driving around. I figured dad would follow a truck through the gate so he could watch me go by, bit I still didn't see him anywhere.
Point Arena is made of a bunch of little points and rows of rocks all running parallel and to the northwest. This creates a few small points and channels south of the main peninsula. I saw an arch through the first point and took a short cut through it to the first narrow channel. Here I found another point with a smaller arch, the one I had seen from the lighthouse tower the day before. This arch was too close to where the breakers started and did not look tall enough to go under during the larger swell. I decided to paddle around the next point instead of through it. Across the following channel I found myself up against the main part of the peninsula with the lighthouse on it. It looked like there was a gap through the end of the peninsula where I could paddle through, but this turned out to be blocked by an impassable dike of rock. I had to turn and go around the end of the point where the water was very rough.
I have been exposed to the physics that explain why waves are rougher on points than they are in harbors. (Waves and Beaches by W. Bascom). But this trip is the first time I noticed that my physical intuition has completely internalized the reasons for this. Imagining what the topology of the ocean bottom looked like around the point, I saw (in my minds eye) why the water acted like a focusing lens to magnify the effect of the waves on the point. I further noticed that unlike an optical lens, the ocean bottom gradually changes the "index of refraction" as the waves move into shallower water. This is difficult to do with an optical lens where there is a hard boundary between glass and air. The index of refraction changes abruptly at that edge. Imagine a lens made out of clear jelly that gradually changes density to gently bend light beams. The only application I know of where we (technological man) have used a soft-edged optical refraction trick is in the sheathing of optical fiber cables. And I had just paddled over two of these fibers a few kilometers back!
The rough waves around Point Arena forced me to paddle out to sea and I was only brave enough to go behind the last few visible rocks. I saw turbulence roiling up from submerged rocks under me and paddled faster to get away from them before a wave broke around me. Once I was around the point things started to calm down and I went behind a row of large rocks that ran parallel to shore. I stayed behind these rocks as the water got shallower and shallower until I found myself stuck high and dry on a stony reef. I waited for another few waves to pick my keel up, then polled my kayak into a deeper channel I had seen exposed between waves. The water got deeper again behind the reef and I paddled as far as I could before the cliff turned out and forced me to follow it out behind the long row of rocks.
As I negotiated the rough water between the cliff and the last rock, a shout came from the top of the cliff. Looking up I finally saw my dad, who had been unable to get into the lighthouse grounds before 10:00 AM. We waved at each other and I continued on down the coast. The road out to the lighthouse runs paralel to the shore here so dad was able to follow me for the next two kilometers. The cliff along this stretch was a single tilted slab of sandstone with only a few breaks in it. One of these breaks was large enough for the ocean to get through and I paddled in hoping to see caves or gaps behind the slab. I found that the water only extended a handful of meters in each direction and there were no caves.
Dad popped out at the top of the cliff from time to time and shouted down at me or waved. One time I saw him appear on the cliff looking in the wrong direction and shouted myself to get his attention. I had brought both radios so we could keep in touch, but one of them had been left on and its battery was dead. So we had to make do with inarticulate shouts and hand signals. When we made it to the last cove before the road turned away from shore, dad made a hand-sign indicating he saw an arch. I had seen this arch from the road the day before but was approaching it at an angle that hid it from me. Without dad scouting it out I might have missed it completely. This arch started out wide, but narrowed down and jogged right a little. I scraped through and examined another arch a little closer to the beach. This one was too small to fit through so I continued down the coast. Dad and I were now out of touch until I landed in Arena Cove.
I found myself behind a long narrow rocky island. There was a large arch and cave at the north end of this island. HUGE breakers were channeled into this cave for some reason. I paddled into the arch and took a peak north out the cave. No big breakers came in for a while, no large waves were visible, so I risked going out through the cave and back around past the arch. No problems!
I started down the east side of the rock but soon found a pair of caves, one too narrow to fit through. I paddled through the larger cave and into a channel that came out the other side of the island. Then a rough set of waves come in and made going back through cave difficult, so I continued down the west side of the rock. Near the south end of the island I saw a narrow channel through a shallow rocky reef. This reef was sometimes completely awash under water. At the end of the channel was a narrow cave that turned right, widened, and had light coming back around the corner. I figured this meant there was a place to exit or at least turn around. I considered passing by this spot, but it looked like even the strongest waves calmed down a bit before the cave. I waited for a calm time and headed in. Half way down the channel, I saw some amazing rock formations. I passed them up on my first trip by, intent on getting through the arch at the end before the next large wave. I came out and found a large safe exit.
The formations in the channel were so interesting that I risked going back through the arch a minute later to take some pictures. The rocks here had been worn away in rectangular patterns, producing a shelf supported by almost regular columns. It looked like a wharf made out of solid rock, almost as if it had been carved by human hands. I sat in the channel through a set of large waves to get some good pictures. As I had observed, the water in the channel was calm enough to sit safely in a kayak through these waves.
Leaving the island, I paddled back to shore to investigate a bunch of caves in the cliffs. One of these caves had two round pillars outside it and a round support column carved into the middle of the arch. I paddled around the column and through the cave into a little sinkhole. There was a pebbly beach on the other side of the sinkhole where I landed to stretch my legs for a minute. Another one of these caves had a large chamber with a rocky beach on the far side. The chamber was so large that the waves calmed down and broke gently on the beach. I felt safe surfing through the cave entrance and paddling close to the beach. I looked into the corners of each cave I went in but none of them connected to any of the other caves. In a cove between caves I found a waterfall pouring straight down from the tip of a point of rock. I don't understand why the water didn't go down the little valley on either side instead of going out to the point. But I enjoyed looking at the beautiful result.
The next point had rough waves that forced me away from shore. There was a row of rocks close to shore that I didn't get to paddle behind. As I paddled up the shore I saw arches in several of these rocks. One of these was a high thin arch of stone that I really wanted to get close to. Eventually I overcame my fears and paddled between two rocks to get close to shore. Here I discovered that all the arches I had seen in the rocks here were aligned up in a straight line. Perhaps the result of a strip of soft stone that had eroded faster than the surrounding rock. By positioning the kayak in the right spot, I could see the lighthouse through the row of arches!
The large thin arch was the last one in this row, and it was too tempting to pass up. I paddled through it even though it was surrounded by white water. I picked a good time, but then immediately started looking for a way to get back out to sea. There was a large gap between rocks ahead, but first I passed a narrow crack leading out. I decided to get out of there ASAP and started up the narrow crack. As I made it half way out a big set of waves came in and the first one rose up into a two meter wall threatening to break. I plowed up and over it before that happened, shouting "Just in time kayaking!". Behind me the channel close to shore roared and turned into solid churning white water.
After that I stayed out of the channel until I came around the next corner. This turned out to be the opening to the Point Arena Cove and I could see the pier. I paddled between a few sets of rocks and close to shore down the north side of the cove. From quite a distance I recognized the red sweater my dad was wearing. He was on the end of the pier and waved back at me when I raised my paddle. In the calm harbor I made an easy landing and dad helped carry the kayak up to the car.
THIS IS IT! I have now paddled past every inch of the Mendocino County coastline! (Not to mention Sonoma and Mendocino). Next on the agenda? This winter when the ocean is too rough to paddle, I'm going to get serious about paddling around the inside of the San Francisco Bay.
