After being dropped off the evening before, I woke up around 7:00 AM, and started breaking camp. I'm sure I dragged my heels for fear of the rough surf launch I was expecting. As a result it took me three hours to break camp, move everything down to the water, and pack it all in the kayak. I walked up the length of the beach looking for the best spot. I didn't find anyplace especially good but noticed that the waves did calm down occasionally and made the launch look possible. I put on the full wetsuit just in case, then managed to hit one of those calm times perfectly and made it out to sea without even getting water splashed in my face. All that worrying for nothing!
I paddled between a bunch of rocks off shore, then past an area with a sandy beach and large breakers. When I got to the reef where we went tide pooling the evening before, I expected to have to stay far from shore. However, the reef apparently has a sharp drop-off so the waves didn't break until they hit the edge. I was able to paddle just a few meters away from the edge and watch the water roar over the rocks and spill back down. This close to the action, I could see channels in the reef. We had walked around several of these channels while tide pooling. These had water in them even at low tide and sandy beaches at their ends. At high tide this morning, the channels were under enough water that the waves didn't break in them. I could have paddled safely into each of these little sandy beaches with waves crashing noisily on either side. I wasn't going to try this until I saw a narrow finger of water extending into the land, a slot in the cliffs of the shore that turned and continued out of sight around a corner. I had to brave the channel in the surf to go explore this. When I got inside, the water calmed way down, and turned an ugly milky white color. The slot ended with a small dirty beach with dirty brown water. There was an awful smell of sewage. Apparently there is a house up by Highway One who's septic "system" drains straight into the ocean here. Disgusting!
I quickly went back out to the ocean, turned left and paddled past the exact spot we went tide pooling. I went into a little cove south of this that had a bunch of caves. One of these caves was a pair of 1 meter diameter holes just two meters above the waterline. I wanted to climb up there and look inside. I tried climbing up off the kayak and getting onto the rocky cliff. But I couldn't hold on with one hand holding onto the paddle. (Which was attached to the paddle leash, which was attached to the bow line which was attached to my ride home). I slipped on the rock and jumped back into the water, but not before scratching up the palm of my left hand on the barnacle crusted rock. I tried climbing up out of the water, but the rock sloped away from me under the waterline and I could not get a grip. So I gave up, got back in the kayak, and went to look at some caves near the waterline.
The next cave had brown water and the smell of sewage coming out of it. I could see some buildings at the top of the cliff, so this could not be the same raw sewage from the last place, but a second bad septic system. Now I know why the mussels are allowed to grow so big on the nearby reef. There is raw sewage leaking into the water on both sides of this reef, and the locals know better than to eat food out of their own cesspool. It's only foolish tourists like me who collect a few mussels there from time to time. I began to worry about what I had done to myself when I ate a dozen of those mussels with my dinner the evening before. I wondered if I boiled them long enough, or if boiling is really sufficient. Then I looked in horror at the scratches on my left hand! Although none of the cuts was deep enough to bleed, I was swimming nearby in this water a minute ago. I have some bad cuts on my shin that I think have had plenty of time to heal, but now my skin is crawling just thinking about the water leaching under my wetsuit down there.
While thinking these horrible thoughts, I paddled past a few more caves. One of them was quite large and deep, so I went inside. It went so far that I could not see where I was going after a while. I turned around to try backing in, and the light from the opening dazzled me. This made it harder to see in the dark, so I gave up and went back out. I was going to avoid paddling into any more narrow fingers of ocean, for fear of finding more stagnant water, but my map showed a very long one. I looked into this and thought I saw water coming in near the other end. So I paddled into it, hoping to find another exit. Down near the end, there was a cave going west back out to sea that was too low to paddle through safely. Finally, at the very end of this channel, there was a large long cave I could see south through in the direction I wanted to go. I waited at the mouth of this and started in over the crest of a wave coming out. I counted to eleven (the period of the swells today according to my weather radio) and didn't make it all the way out the other side before the next wave came in. But the waves were mild, the cave large, and I easily made it through.
For a few kilometers, the breakers got rougher and forced me away from shore and around most of the rocks. In the distance, I could see the long stretch of Ten Mile Beach, the north end of MacKerricher State Park. I knew I would not be able to land for the whole length of this beach (fortunately not really ten miles long) so I started looking for a place to land, stretch my legs, and eat lunch. I found some calm water behind a bunch of rocks and landed on the north end of a beautiful little cove with a smooth sand beach. I went for a walk along this beach, and looking down I thought I saw reflections of the cloudy sky in the water slick left behind by the waves. But when I walked over these "clouds", they were still there beneath my feet. The sand of this beach is apparently made of two different colored materials that apparently have very different densities. The action of the waves is constantly sorting the two colors (white and dark brown) into different piles, ripples, and sweeping curves. Where the sand was smooth with no pebbles, these patterns looked a lot like the high cloud cover today. Where there were pebbles in the sand, the patterns rayed out from each pebble. Where the beach was steeper, the patterns were diamond shaped and more regular. Just walking on the sand changed the patterns drastically on the next wave.
I finally took off my wetsuit jacket, which I had left on for all the paddling behind rocks and into caves. I have been experimenting with a pair of lycra tights under my wetsuit to prevent chaffing and to make putting on a wet wetsuit easier. It did prevent the arms of my jacket from chaffing this whole morning, so the experiment was a success. However, if I'm not wearing something over it, the un- insulated lycra amplifies the effect of wind chill. It seems to suck heat out of my body like a thermoelectric cooler! I found this out at Drakes Estero last weekend, so this trip I carried a nylon windbreaker to cover my arms when not wearing the wetsuit jacket. I put this windbreaker on for the last leg of the trip which worked well, keeping me warm and comfortable.
I easily paddled through the mild breakers and around the last few rocks at the north end of Ten Mile Beach. The breakers started getting really big. I figured I was going to get bored with no rocks to paddle around, so I headed a little closer to shore to go around the last big rock. Just as I stared around it, a sleeper wave broke over and around the rock. I was shoved closer to shore and surfed half way around and directly behind the rock. I hadn't consciously been noticing it earlier, but my subconscious informed me at this moment that the sleeper waves had been coming in pairs all day. I knew that another one was coming soon, and I was in exactly the wrong place behind the rock. I wanted to turn towards shore and paddle away from it, but I could see the last wave was already starting to break for the long trip to the beach. I didn't want to get washed ashore here, because it would be murder to surf launch back out again and it was too far to walk. But I also knew that I didn't have time to get past the rock before the next wave. So I compromised and headed 45 degrees to the wave fronts away and past the rock. The next wave hit and breakers wrapped around the rock and slammed into me sideways. I braced as hard as I could into the white water and got drenched from head to foot. But I was able to hold the kayak upright . I paddled straight out to sea past the south edge of the rock shouting at myself: "You dummy! Did you enjoy your last exciting rock? Are you ready to get bored now?"
The sun hid behind some dark clouds, but lit up the horizon south of me with gold and white. The breeze died down and the water took on an oily-smooth appearance. The occasional pair of sleeper waves rose up on my right like mountains of quicksilver. Ahead of me these waves reflected gold and white from the back-lit clouds to the south. To my right they gleamed blue and white from the clear patches of sky showing through at the horizon. Behind me the swells reflected gray and white from the darker solid cloud cover to the north. It was a great time to paddle past a long stretch of "boring" shoreline. I stayed safely far out to sea where the largest of these sleepers didn't break until they were 8 seconds past me and closer to shore. When I was most of the way down this beach and had only a few kilometers to go, the breeze came back up and rippled the surface of the water. This destroyed the quicksilver appearance of the swells. But then I had a small reef to paddle around and a few rocks to avoid before paddling across the last cove before Laguna Point.
I paddled straight across to the rocky point, then turned left to try and make a landing behind the rocks Paul Futcher and I had launched past the last time I was here. But when I got close to the beach, I discovered the waves were breaking around these rocks today. I paddled well past the rocks and prepared to surf ashore in the mild waves. A wave rose up behind me and I started to surf forward with the nose of the kayak dipping under the water. I turned to the right a little, the nose rose up out of the water, and the kayak really took off! This was the best ride I have ever gotten when actually trying to surf! I went so fast I slid out in front of the wave when it slowed down to break, then I braced into the white water and got a second ride a little closer to shore. I had surfed so far to the right that I feared another ride would smack me into the rocks, so I turned to the left. I though I was close enough to shore that I could only ride the breakers in, but the next wave picked me up and surfed me again! Then the breakers carried me sideways safely up onto the sand. A safe and fun end to a long day of camping and kayaking.
