My planning for the upcoming trip to the Pacific Coast of Baja involved getting ready for the worst. I bought a rugged plastic kayak that could take a beating landing on rocky shores. Then I scheduled a private class with John Lull to improve my surf launching and landing skills. John is a Tsunami Ranger and an instructor for California Canoe and Kayak. He has produced and starred in several videos on kayaking, including “Surf Kayaking Fundamentals”, I video that I own a copy of. I talked to John about what skills I should brush up on for the Baja trip and what classes were available. John convinced me that there were no classes that would teach the advanced topics I needed, so we sort of designed a new class to fit my needs
All the guys originally signed up for the Baja trip were invited to take the class with me, but only Sid Taylor and Paul Roggensack were able to fit it into their schedules. Mayly Snow joined us as did two people from BASK. John Somers and Bob Ostertag. We wanted to take the class way in advance of the Baja trip so we would have time to practice before we went. But between everyone’s schedule and cancellations due to weather, the class was put off again and again and finally happened on March 24th. We met on El Granada Beach on Half Moon Bay. The swell was mild but wind waves from an upcoming storm made the beach messy.
In some regards, I was a little disappointed in the class. John went over things that I already knew and I only recall practicing two new skills in the all-day class. The old stuff was surfing and broaching and bracing. Riding waves to shore, turning the boat sideways when the waves break, and leaning on your paddle braced into the wave to keep the boat upright while riding it sideways to shore. The new stuff was learning to surf on the top of the wave and backpedaling out for a launch.
In his videos John talks about surfing on the top of the wave instead of the face of the wave. If you are down on the face of the wave and the wave becomes too steep you can get slammed by the falling water. This is especially true on “dumpy” beaches where the waves wait until they get to a steep beach and then suddenly break right onto shore. Other kayakers teach that you should follow behind a dumping wave like this, but John says that is too late. If you are behind a dumping wave, the backwash will pull you back out to be pummeled by the next wave. If you are directly on top of a dumping wave you can use it to get you as far as possible up the beach and then have time to get out of your kayak before the next wave. Doing this requires riding a knife edge of control. If you slip too far forward on the wave you will fall down the face of the wave and end up in front of it. If you slip just a little bit too far backwards you loose the wave and it goes to shore without you. Staying in the right spot is complicated by the fear you feel as the nose of your boat hangs out over the edge of a cliff of water. That fear usually makes me slip backwards too far and loose the wave. Out of dozens of attempts that day I only felt that I got it right twice. It is something you have to practice and I’ll have to work on it.
With 6 students, John hired an assistant instructor, Debra Volturno. Debra is a Tsunami Ranger and kayak instructor and it was her involvement that convinced Maryly to take the class as well. Debra had a technique to launching on dumpy beaches that involved paddling out into the waves backwards! Coincidentally I had corresponded with John months ago about this very subject. I had been surfing in my Pirouette, a small (compared to a sea kayak) boat that I bought just for playing in waves. Several times I had paddled into a wave that looked too big to paddle over, so I had turned around. My logic at the time was that if I turned the boat around before the wave hit, at least it would push me forward. If I didn’t turn around and it pushed me backwards I would fall over because I’m not good at surfing backwards. However, I discovered that if I leaned back in the boat and backpedaled I would often blast over the wave backwards! I asked John why this boat could go backwards over waves that I didn’t think it could make it over forwards. Is there something about the design of the boat? It has very little volume in the stern and has a sharper point there to spear the wave. I can lean back farther than I can forwards, perhaps that helps. But John said that I was just imagining things and there is no preference in the direction of the kayak. He says that if I had kept paddling forwards I would have made it over those waves anyway. Debra seemed to think there was some advantage to backing into a wave so I was interested to hear her out.
In a gentle beach with a soup zone you can get in your boat in shallow water, paddle out into the soup zone, and attach the spray skirt to the boat before paddling into larger waves. On a dumping beach there is no soup zone to get settled in your boat. Debra suggests starting with the boat facing backwards up the beach. Standing over the boat she pushes it back into the water and falls down into the seat in the process. Her legs are sill outside the coaming where she says they provide a little extra stability. Then she leans backwards and backpedals out through the waves. She says that leaning backwards plugs up the back of the cockpit and prevents most of the water from a breaking wave from getting inside and there is surprisingly little water in the boat after a launch like this. One nice thing about a dumping beach is that you don’t have far to travel to get past the impact zone, and then you can swing your feet inside, pump out any water, and attach the spray skirt. Even if you are playing in the surf with your spray skirt on, it is often difficult to turn a long sea kayak around when you are near the shore. So if my kayak is facing the wrong way now, instead of wasting energy turning it I just backpedal out!
A few hours of playing in the surf, especially trying out new things, had us exhausted. While passing Sid on one of my trips back out through the surf, I called out “In Baja we will only have to do this once a day!”