Marvin Feldman scheduled a BASK paddle from Muir Beach to Stinson Beach and back. Maryly had never been on this stretch of coast and was eager to go. I had done this stretch once years ago in poor weather conditions so I was eager to see it again with more experienced eyes. I also wanted to get more accustomed to my new Narpa touring boat.
I wanted to get a feel for how the new boat would feel loaded so I showed up for this paddle with seven empty five liter water bags. After carrying my boat down to the beach I filled the water bags at the parking lot and carried seventy pounds of water down to distribute in different places around the kayak. I put two bags behind the seat and crammed them in position with my day bag and the seat. I put two bags in the front compartment and the remaining three in the rear compartment. These were pinned in place by inflating the float bags to the max.
The beach at Muir is fairly steep so the heavily laden boat (only half as heavy as it will be in Baja next month) slid down the sand into the water easily. Once in deep water the boat felt pretty good to me, except it turned even slower than before. We paddled off towards Stinson Beach.
One of the landmarks along the way is a nude beach where Marvin wanted us to land if it looked reasonable. This is a narrow beach with rocky cliffs on each side, so it requires skill or calm weather to get a kayak beached there. As we sat watching from a safe distance a LARGE WAVE came by and convinced all of us to continue on to Stinson.
At the extreme south end of Stinson Beach we set up to make our landing. Marvin went in first to catch any following boats that needed help. After spending months in her sit-inside kayak Maryly was in her Tsunami sit-on-top boat again and was a little unstable. On her surf landing she got pitched over and out of her boat. Everyone else made it OK. The Narpa turned on me when I wanted it to surf down the wave, but then it rode the wave calmly sideways up onto the beach.
After lunch Maryly was nervous about launching again. She had to try three times to get her boat out through the surf and got washed back without it on the first two tries. We had tried the first two times to pick calm sets in the waves for her but failed. When I launched I also failed to pick a calm set. So I had to sit in the soup zone and blast through one breaker after another. But eventually the waves cleared in front of me and I made it out to sea.
On the trip back I tried rolling my heavily loaded boat. It rolled back up with no problems so I started doing more rolls to finish up the day with six rolls (according to Roger's Rule). On one of these rolls some of the water bags started shifting around. The boat came back up but it listed to one side. I edged the boat in the opposite side and then jerked the boat while bracing with the paddle. The load shifted back to something like center and I decided to stop practicing rolling for the day.