I planned this trip with Charles Hessom, who was a bachelor for a weekend while his wife Cathy was away teaching a music class. I suggested that Charles take his son Sean with us and we go camping. Charles and Sean could drive along the shore and spend a day at the coast, then pick me up on the other end of a one-way trip. I drove to Charles house in on Saturday, he loaded all his camping gear in my van then we all drove up together. We drove out to Usal Beach which is the last beach you can get to before the Lost Coast area. Usal beach Campground turns out to be a beautiful remote beach down a long (9 kilometer) dirt road, the beginning of the Usal Road. This road is a beautiful tunnel through the greenery of the Siskione Wilderness area. At Usal Beach the topology opens up into a wide valley with a soupy beach and lots of campgrounds between the trees. Charles saw a bobcat when driving out later, and someone else we met had seen a brown bear. The wilderness was full of birds, which we rarely saw up close. But their song made the campground that much more enjoyable.
I had tentatively planned to get here early enough to go out in my kayak in the afternoon and try to get some abalone for dinner. But when we got to Usal we saw that the beach was a wide sandy beach and I would have to travel kilometers away from here to find a kelp bed that would sustain an abalone population. It was almost 5:00 PM when we set up camp so I figured there was no way to squeeze an abalone dive into the evening anyway. Fortunately, Charles had brought marinated lamb and a bunch of vegetables to make shish kabobs. We just stayed around the camp and worked on getting the fire to produce coals to cook dinner over.
The weather report had been predicting rain for Saturday night or Sunday morning, and I was concerned we might have a wet miserable time. It rained lightly for an hour while we were driving, but cleared up before we got to camp. The light rain held down the dust on the normally dusty dirt road and made the trip out more pleasant. Charles predicted that this short shower was all that we would see and this turned out to be correct. We had great weather for the rest of the weekend, unless you count the swell at sea. When we arrived Saturday afternoon we went and looked at the beach, which had some dumpy areas and some soupy areas that looked easy to launch from. That was close to a low tide on Saturday afternoon. When I made it to the beach in the morning it was approaching a high tide. Under these conditions, the beach was very dumpy and didn't look like fun to launch from. I put on my full wetsuit with jacket.
On my first attempt to launch, I almost made it until a large wave caught me and surfed the kayak backwards to shore. I lost my brace, got rolled out, lost my grip on the paddle, then had to swim to shore. I'm starting to consider not wearing the wetsuit jacket for kayaking any more. I chaffs under my arms. It resists my arms moving to paddle and they quickly get tired. The constricting 14 mm around my chest makes breathing a chore when I need air the most. It was a sunny morning with warming air so I took off the wetsuit jacket and switched to a windbreaker that wouldn't wear out my arms prematurely. Paddling all day long does not make my arms sore the next day, but standing in the surf holding onto the kayak does. The waves jerk and pull at my left arm as I try to hold the kayak in position in the breakers. The beach was too steep to have a soup zone I could paddle in waiting for a window of opportunity. I tried switching arms but I don't have any practice getting on from that side and could not get going in a rush when the waves looked good.
I looked for a rip current but did not see one that stood still on this beach. After a while I developed a hypothesis that the rip was reforming every so often on the south end of the beach and moving north. I would see a window in the waves to my left, then in front of me, and later on my right. I tried launching over the last few large waves in front of me when I saw the window on the left. On the second try using this algorithm, I made it out to sea. But it had taken me over an hour to make it. Most of that hour was spent sitting on the kayak trying to catch my breath and waiting for my arms to regain some energy. Soon after I launched I saw a flash of silver-white in the water with a white fin sticking up out of it. A shark? It didn't look very big so I paddled closer. It's the shark I don't see that is going to cause me trouble. But when I got closer I saw I had found a sunfish. These are funny looking animals that I have only seen in aquariums and didn't even know we had them out there. They have a large thin, flat, square body with no tail. For propulsion there are two large shark-like fins, one on top and one on the bottom. This sunfish was floundering on the surface waving one fin ineffectuality in the air. I think it was sick or otherwise damaged and did not belong here.
Charles and I had agreed to try to contact each other by radio in the ten minutes around each hour. Since I ended up launching right around 10:00 am, I tried calling Charles and found him listening and able to respond. We were only 200 meters apart and still in sight of each other. The rest of the day we had phenomenal luck getting the line-of-sight marine radio to work in some situations where I would not have guessed it would work. We heard each other continuously while I was bobbing up and down in big swell and thought that the water might break up the signal. When I landed for lunch I was able to hear Charles calling me from around the corner as he hiked down a creek valley towards the beach. Another time, I was rounding Cape Vizcaino and Charles was in the office of the Wages Creek Campground eight kilometers away. He heard me calling even though I was broadcasting at only one Watt to conserve my batteries. Aside from a few attempts at Avila Beach and in Kauai, this was the first time I have had someone follow along the shore with a radio. It solved all those annoying questions that come up after you are separated.
The marine weather report claimed that the swell off Point Arena (the closest buoy) was only 6 feet every eleven seconds. This should have been mild, but after my rough launch I was suspicious of the report. They continued to report six feet all day long, but when I got home and checked the data on the WEB I discovered that the swell had never dropped below 6.9 feet all day and the weathermen must have truncated it to six feet. As I paddled south from Usal Beach the waves broke noisily on a bunch of inaccessible sandy beaches that were inaccessible to me as well this day. Well, I could easily have crash landed on any of them but then I would have spent another hour trying to get back off. This area apparently had a lot of shallow sandy areas offshore as well. The waves would rise up over these and threaten to break far from shore, with a muddy sandy color swirled into the water. The waves broke far enough from shore that I didn't feel comfortable paddling very close and did not get to go behind very many rocks on this trip. I saw a few arches very close to shore and had to stay far away from them.
Right after I launched I saw a couple sea lions swimming my way. I kept getting glimpses of them and found it comforting that I had an escort as I headed south. When I approached Soldier Frank Point I started seeing lots of Stellers sea lions on the rocks. One large rock had a commotion on it that I though might have been caused by my presence, but it turned out to be a large male sea lion chasing another male across the top of the rock.
Charles and I had agreed to meet for lunch at Rockport Beach which looked like it might be accessible from the road. It also looked protected by a narrow point and a rock (named Seal Rock of course) and had the potential of being an easy place to land. I made excellent time and got there an hour earlier than originally planned. The beach had a wide surf zone and looked like it would be easier to launch from than Usal. Easier but still a daunting cold wet trip that I wanted to avoid. The "seal rock" off this beach had no seals on it at all, just a bunch of old concrete foundations from the dog-hole port days. I paddled around the rock and slid in behind it. Behind the protective point on the north end of the beach I found a few sheltered beaches between the rocks. I had to brave the very choppy water between the point and the big rock, but made a very easy and safe landing on one of these sheltered beaches. I knew the tide was going out, so I felt safe leaving my kayak here for a while as I scrambled over the rocks to the main beach with my lunch.
On the beach I found one guy, named Wane, camping and eager to talk. I thought that his presence here meant that there was an access road, but my hopes were dashed. Wane works for Louisiana Pacific (LP -- a local lumber company) which owns all the land around here. He told me that the roads are gated and locked. He had hiked in here to camp for the weekend. I figured that Charles could not hike in from the gate with his six-year-old son and we would not be able to meet for lunch. But as I walked up the beach, I heard Charles call me on the marine radio. Since the radio could reach up this valley, we figured that the walk down it could not be very long. Charles and Sean hiked out to picnic with me and it only took them fifteen minutes. Wane told us that LP has their company picnic here every year and that is one reason why they have chemical toilets, picnic tables and fire rings out by the beach. It was a beautiful and convenient place to have our lunch. This would be a nice place to stop and kayak camp one day.
Charles didn't want to scramble over the rocks with his son Sean, so they watched from the beach as I went back to my kayak and paddled out from behind the protective rocks. Then I headed south towards Cape Vizcaino. This point has a large offshore rock that I wanted to paddle behind but it looked just a little too rough. Looking into the channel behind the rock I saw an incredible waterspout. It looked like a cave two meters tall had filled with water and jetted it out ten meters or more behind the rock. That doesn't look like a cave I will want to paddle through. As I went the long way around the rock, the water got incredibly choppy. The reflected waves off the rock created chop that was over a meter tall and made for a wild ride. In these choppy conditions, however, the waves never seemed to rise up to break so I considered getting closer to the rock. When the angle was right, I saw a huge cave completely through the rock.
This cave was large and wide and couldn't be the source of the waterspout I had seen earlier. Could it? It would have taken a four meter wave just to close it out, and the cave was not constricting enough to make even that monster wave jet out the back like I saw. Looking around at the large swell and the choppy water, I turned in and headed for the cave. "This is probably really stupid", I told myself, but I went into it anyway. The whole time I had watched the cave I had not seen a wave large enough to break into it. It looked reasonably safe and this turned out to be correct. When I came out into the water behind the rock I ran out of film in my camera and had to nervously open my hatch to get out another one. (Thinking: Maybe opening the hatch is the stupid part). While I drifted there re-arranging cameras, a strong current pulled me back into the cave and threatened to pull me back out to sea. I backed up, however, to take some pictures behind the rock. I paddled north around the waterspout I had seen earlier. This turned out to be a two meter tall crack in the rock that trapped waves coming completely through the rock. It would roar and jet water every once in a while and fill the air with spray. The channel behind the rock got very narrow on the south end and lead to a shallow rocky area with breaking surf. Instead of exiting back out the cave, I went around the north end of the rock, through a gap between two rocks that had looked too rough to paddle in through before.
Continuing to paddle south of Cape Vizcaino, I discovered that I had taken almost an hour to paddle the first few kilometers of my afternoon stretch. Finding something interesting to paddle around meant that I was not going to make it to the take-out spot as fast as my morning dash had convinced me. But this was when I made contact with Charles eight kilometers away and was able to warn him I would be late. The stretch of coast south of the cape had crumbly cliffs and few rocks. Highway One finally emerged down a creek valley and started along the edge of the coastline. A long narrow strip of land between the road and the water here is Westport-Union Landing State Beach. Camping is allowed here, but their beach is narrow and dumpy. My goal was the privately owned Wages Creek Campground where I had launched from last fall. But first I had to paddle past Abalone Point.
Abalone Point turned out to be a short flat point barely sticking out from the road with a bunch of camper-vans parked on it. But the point continued under the water with a lot of submerged rocks extending much farther out to sea. I had to turn and go a kilometer from shore to get around these. Once past them, I still saw a smattering of submerged rocks between me and Wages Creek Beach. I had to weave a path around and through them to avoid the large waves that broke over the rocks and continued to break for a long distance towards shore. By now it was check-in time on the radio and I made contact with Charles. Wages Creek did not look how I remembered it so I was a little concerned that I might not be in the right place. I could not see Charles and Sean, but could see a family of three, one of whom was wearing a bright red jacket. When I described this to Charles, he was able to verify that I was looking at the right beach and direct me to where he was. He could not see me, however, until I waved my paddle over my head. I had Charles walk to the mildest looking place on the beach so I would have someplace to aim for.
When I launched from Waged Creek Beach last year, the beach had a narrow soup zone but mild waves. As I approached the beach on this day, the soup zone was almost 200 meters wide and the waves did not look mild at all. I hoped that I would be able to surf most of the way through this to get it over with. Charles picked a mild spot on the beach, with the disclaimer that he figured the landing looked like a matter of good timing. I started in after what I though was a large set, but an even larger wave rose up and broke right behind me while I was still more than 200 meters from shore. The wave slammed into me and I tried to turn sideways and brace into it. If I had been just a little bit farther from where the wave broke I might have been able to hold onto it, but I was rolled over. This far from shore I really didn't like the idea of swimming in, so I tried holding onto the paddle and getting the wave to tow me in. Unfortunately the wave had a good grip on the boat and pulled the paddle out of my grasp.
I came up for air and found that I was still over 100 meters from shore in water that was over my head. Even though the water felt very deep there were still a few more large waves breaking behind me to tumble me under. I tried body surfing and discovered a new use for my helmet: When a breaker hit me it tended to blast under the helmet and try to pull it off. It felt like I was getting a significant amount of thrust from my chin strap when this happened and I was glad to get that much more help getting to shore. Trying to swim against the backwash between waves, it occurred to me that Charles might have inadvertently chosen a rip current when he picked the mildest spot on the beach. But soon my feet started hitting bottom and I was able to walk a large portion of the distance up to where my boat was waiting for me. "In case you couldn't tell, that was NOT good timing"! I told Charles when we met.
