Ken Mannshardt schedules this paddle every summer and I was eager to join a bunch of BASKers paddling the Mendocino Coast again. Ken reserves the campground from mid week through the weekend to mid week again and I have come up for a nice long stay in previous years. But this year I was working full time again (for the first time in almost a decade) and the best I could do was to take Friday off. If I was by myself I would have packed on Wednesday evening, taken my gear to work on Thursday morning, then left after work and driven half the night to be in Mendocino for paddling on Friday. But I was driving up with Maryly and she does not like driving at night. She drove up Thursday evening to join me for dinner and then we would leave early the next morning.
It takes two people twice as long to get ready as one person, so it was very late, in my humble opinion, when we finally got our early start. Then Maryly enjoys the process of a road trip more than I do and expects to stop for lunch and for sightseeing several times along the way. I was resigned to this, but was still disappointed when we didn’t make it to the campground until around 2:00 PM. I took a whole day off from work, and most of it was gone and wasted! Everyone else had already gone paddling and was trickling back into the campground. It was too late to do a paddle of any significance and we didn’t want to have to put wet gear on the next morning for nothing, so I didn’t get to go paddling at all on Friday.
Another disappointment was the hassle of the campground parking. Last year we had run-ins with the rangers who didn’t like us parking our cars at the day-use area in front of the beach at Russian Gulch State Park at night. The parking lot in front of the campground only holds 14 cars but they let 40 people camp there. I guess they based this on calculations showing that families tend to have 2.85 people in them on average (not counting Rover) so there should be enough parking. But as usual, the rangers are weird about overnight parking in day use lots. Even though the beach lot was a short walk from our parking lot, even though it was unused by anyone else at night, even though it was the location of the nearest bathroom to the group camp, we were not supposed to park overnight there!
Well, this year the rangers found a solution to the problem. Even though we had signed up 40 people to come and camp in the group camp, they stared turning us away after the 14th car had arrived. We either had to leave our cars out on Highway One, or find another campground that would let us be extra cars. There were two other BASK groups in other campgrounds so there was a good chance we could squeeze into one of them. But at 2:00 PM those other BASKers were out kayaking or otherwise hard to find. We bamboozled the ranger into thinking we had permission from the owner of one of these campgrounds anyway by guessing at their names. The ranger gave us a pass and we were in! Then Maryly acquired a pass from someone who was leaving early. This pass allowed us to park in front of the group campground where our tent was so she gave our pass away to someone else. THEN we noticed that the pass we had was only good for one day. I spent the rest of the weekend worrying and expecting a ranger to chew me out or fine me for having an expired tag on my car with someone else’s license plate number on it.
I talked to Ken Mannshardt about the whole situation and we came up with a couple of solutions for next year. He is going to have to start turning people away after the 14th car . He can still sign more than 14 people up, but they are going to have to find someone else to carpool with or arrange a parking space from someone else. Some of us are going to inundate the Park System next year with requests for all the single family campgrounds on the same days that we get the group campground. Scheduling them far in advance they are actually easy to get and with the recent cut in State Park fees they are actually very inexpensive. We can reserve the whole park to ourselves this way, park wherever we want, and generally have the run of the place.
Saturday evening is our big pot luck dinner, and several of us wanted to get some abalone for that event. Rather than go late in the day as I have done on previous trips, we went early in the morning. We paddled to the beautiful set of arches that connect several calm coves together just north of Russian Gulch State Park. There were four of us diving. Don turned out to be a very good diver and quickly brought up three. I caught two abalone and decided that would be enough. As it turned out I ended up bringing both of mine home! I was diving off Maryly’s Tsunami X1 sit-on-top kayak and had promised to return it by 10:00 AM so she could use it on a paddle with a group of other people. Diving took longer than we expected especially when Ken and Marvin had trouble finding any abalone and wanted to stay until they caught a few. Eventually Don and I headed back without them and I still arrived very late.
Maryly was upset at me for keeping her kayak out so long and delaying the trip. I had also volunteered to lead Maryly and her friends on a trip so they had no choice but to wait for me. It turned out that the trip they wanted to go on was … through the beautiful arches and coves just north of Russian Gulch! So I went through these for a second time in one day. The trip was not a long one because we all wanted to go surfing at nearby Caspar Beach. So after only a few hours on the water we returned to Russian Gulch for lunch and then drove to Caspar for a few hours of surfing. Then it was time to go prepare dinner. I felt like I was rushing everywhere and still not doing the sort of paddling I wanted to do.
Don had spent the afternoon pounding his three abalone and offered one of them to me to cook so I didn’t have to prepare one of mine. Three abalone turned out to be enough for everyone, especially with everyone else preparing something else good to eat! After dinner we stayed up late for stories around the campfire before going to our tents.
The next morning we met Lisa Weg at a reasonably late time to go for a paddle. Although she lives at Point Cabrillo on the coast, Lisa has a new baby and has not been able to go paddling for some time. Her mother was visiting and taking care of baby Zoey, so this was a rare occasion when Lisa could go out for a kayak trip with us. We planned to paddle north from Russian Gulch to Point Cabrillo to look at the lighthouse where Lisa works. Unfortunately, the swell was rising and a wind was starting up from the north. It wasn’t the best day to do this trip. So instead we went ... through the beautiful caves and arches north of Russian Gulch! My third time in one weekend. From there we started north to the lighthouse, but the conditions were beyond some of the paddlers with us. Lisa suggested turning close to shore and going behind an island that she new about. The water was supposed to be calm behind the island but we could not find a way to get into this channel without going through some rough water close to shore and had to turn back.
Some of us drove up to Caspar Beach to go surfing again, but soon it was time to pack up and start for home. I was now triply disappointed in the weekend. Parking hassles with rangers. I had missed going any of the long day paddles and had wasted a three-day weekend driving around and paddling past the same spot over and over again. As beautiful as that spot is there are many other places to see and many other people I wished I had found the time to paddle with. Next year I’m doing this trip on my own schedule.