My dive club, JAWS or Just Add Water Sonoma, scheduled a weekend at Van Damme State Beach. The weather did not look good and my brother, one of the club officers, was fearful that nobody would show up to use all the camp sites they had reserved. He drove up Friday to pick camp sites all in a row, but I had errands to run and couldn’t drive up until late Saturday afternoon. The wind was blowing over 20 knots with whitecaps to the horizon, although the swell was not very big. Paul figured I would not come because the kayaking would not be very good.
When I arrived another diver, Mike Lemon, was about to go out diving for abalone. I had a sit-inside kayak which is not good for diving , and I didn’t have an abalone license yet. But since Mike had no-one else to go out with him I offered to go along as safety kayaker. The wind and waves were coming predominately from the north, so the cove was pretty calm for kayaking. I told Mike about the channel north of Van Damme where I had seen a row of abalone along the bottom of a rocky island. It turns out Mike had never been in these channels and was glad to have me along to show him some interesting places. If you paddle north out of Van Damme Cove, you run into narrow channels between the cliff and large offshore islands or rocks. Frequently, there is a gap in the islands where the surf almost comes in and the channel often makes a sharp turn. If you didn’t know that the channel continued after the turn, and you stopped because of the surf, you might not know that you can zip past the rough water and continue on for hundreds of meters protected from the open sea.
At one point we came to a group of harbor seals hauled out on the side of the channel. Bummer, in order to avoid disturbing them we would have to paddle hundreds of meters away, but the channel was less than 10 meters wide! Mike said it would be OK and we paddled past them. To my surprise, the seals did not panic at the sight of us and charge into the water! They just sat on the rock and watched us go by! I have never seen a more relaxed and laid-back group of harbor seals! I wish all seals could learn that kayakers are not a danger to them. Then I could go exploring rock gardens without fear of disturbing the seals and getting accused of violating the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
Mike picked a little cove between sections of the channel to try his luck abalone diving. He says he saw lots of legal 8” abalone, but was searching for the larger ones. He did find two fat 9” ones and brought those back for dinner. While he dove I tried backing out into the surf but didn’t get any rides. I warned Mike that I would be gone for a quarter hour or so. I asked him, as a personal favor to me, if he would refrain from drowning himself while I was gone. I scooted up the next two sections of the channel behind the rocks. I passed another group of laid-back seals that didn’t panic at the sight of me. I surfed through a narrow crack and poked my nose into several small caves. Then I returned in time to paddle back to Van Damme with Mike. We went into several large caves that we had bypassed on the way out. All in all it was a fun afternoon paddle on a day that was predicted to be miserable.
Mike cleaned and sliced and pounded and egged and breaded (with crumbled Ritz Crackers) one of his abalone. But all the JAWS divers had come up this weekend despite the weather and filled up the camp sites. They had each caught one or two abalone so there was more than enough for all of us to eat great food until we though we would burst. Mike didn’t cook his second abalone and then caught a few more the next day, so he gave me two to take home. John, another JAWS diver had a similar problem and gave me one of his as well. So I ended up with quite a catch without having to go diving at all myself!