Every year for quite some time now I have scheduled a kayak camping trip to Bear Harbor on the Lost Coast at the northern end of the Mendocino County. The last few years the weather has not been very good for this trip. Particularly, the ocean swell has been fairly large and prevented us from going into all the caves and arches or from landing at some of the other beaches. Late fall is supposed to be the calmest time of year on the water, until the storms start up again in the Gulf of Alaska and send swell down from the northwest. The storms have started early the last several years and I’m thinking of moving the date into September next year!
I had stated that if the swell was over 8 feet I would not try to paddle to the campground but would drive straight there to meet everyone. I drove up late Thursday evening with Fred Cooper. We might have driven out to camp at Usal Beach and been tempted to paddle to Bear Harbor. But I forgot to buy gas when we stopped for dinner in Willits. When we got to the turn off for Usal Beach we didn’t have enough gas left to drive into the campground and back, so we had to keep going until 15 miles later when we finally found a gas station open late at night. Then we simply kept going and arrived at the parking lot to Bear Harbor at midnight. Instead of hiking out to the campgrounds at the harbor, we just set out sleeping bags in the campground next to the parking lot.
In the morning we hiked out with a little bit of gear to check out the campgrounds. There were three other cars in the parking lot. This worried me because there are only three good campsites close to the water. The two closest to the water were taken, but one of them was a guy on his way to hike the Lost Coast Trail. He let us park a kayak in his spot to reserve it for us. The best campsite was taken by a father and son who would be there another day, so we took the remaining third site. We had been hassled by the rangers about having too many tents in one campsite last years. Even with two of them we were pushing the rules and hoped that having several people sleeping in bivvy sacks or on tarps would prevent the rangers from noticing us.
When I drove out to pay for our campsites, I ran into John Somers and Lucy O’Brien who had just finished paying for them already! The camp hosts knew which campsites were available and sold them the two that we had already “reserved”. We are lucky that someone else did not come in and reserve them before we had time to drive out and do so ourselves!
When Nancy Powell arrived we had 5 kayakers ready to go and launched for a short paddle north to Needle Rock and back. As I mentioned, the swell was larger than we could have hoped for and the water was very rough between the Cluster Cone Rocks just outside the harbor. John paddled between the smaller rocks and between the sets of breaking waves to get out to the Cluster Cones. Then he paddled through a small arch in one of these big offshore rocks. A big set came in and the water surged back and forth over a shallow reef that John had spent too much time thinking about paddling over. As the water surged under him, it pulled the outside edge of his boat under. This had him falling over into the water slipping under his boat. When he tried to brace on this side of his kayak, the water was still slipping under him and he could not effectively brace. The water pulled his paddle under and he went over.
I figured John could roll himself back up, but the next time I saw his boat it had been shoved up against one of the big Cluster Cone Rocks. A wave came in and picked up the stern of his boat and set it down way up on the rock. I watched John trying to set up for a roll with only the bow of the boat (and his head) hanging down far enough to reach the water. After the next wave John was out of his boat. He drifted into the choppy area that I had avoided when I went between the rocks. I paddled over to meet him and offer assistance. He asked me to give him a few minutes to rescue himself. He tried to do a re-entry and roll, and tried to do a cowboy re-entry. But it turned out that this was his first trip in a new boat and he was unable to get back into it in the choppy conditions. Although he didn’t believe that it was necessary, he let me tow his boat out of the choppy area into calmer water behind the Cluster Cones. There we did a T-rescue and got John back into his kayak.
John promised to be more conservative the rest of the day, and we continued on. The water was too rough and the tide too high to go through the arch in Morgan Rock. We hoped that the falling tide would make it safer and continued on to Needle Rock. We turned back a short distance past Needle Rock and came back to watch the waves at Morgan Rock again. The big sets were still completely closing out the cave. It is a bad sign when you look into a cave and water is pouring off the ceiling! John and Nancy and I all waited for a calm set and risked going through anyway with the waves. Nancy timed it so close that she surfed through the cave at high speed and the cave almost closed out behind her! I turned around and went out against the waves on a medium sized set. It was a lot more work and not very much safer than going with the waves.
When we got back to Bear Harbor two more kayakers had arrived, completing our camping compliment for the weekend. We spent some time surfing in the waves that managed to wrap around the point into the harbor. I got a few good rides, but they didn’t seem as easy to catch as I remember from other times here. I tried going part way around the point and waiting for the waves before they turned inside. One REALLY BIG wave rose up and broke too close behind me. I broached sideways on the wave and rode it like a bucking bronco all the way around the point and most of the way across the harbor! A couple of times the wave rolled over the bow of my boat and pushed it down. It would pop back up again with a particularly violent buck! I managed to hold onto my brace and stay upright for the whole sideways ride, but felt like I was millimeters away from loosing it the whole trip.
We started cooking our evening meal early so that we could eat before dark. I suggested that we plan a longer trip for the next day, our one full day on this three day camping excursion. I thought it would be reasonable to paddle down to look at Usal Beach and back again. This started a long discussion about how to pee on the high seas. People in dry-suits, with or without relief zippers in them, would have to get their friends to help stabilize their kayak while they rolled down their suit and mooned us. The discussion continued the next morning at breakfast and there was still concern about being on the water for 18 miles with no good places to land and take a pee break. I told the story of the day in Baja when I paddled 30 miles in 10 hours without a place to land and without peeing, even into my wetsuit.
The whole discussion was all made moot by the weather. The waves did not calm down like some of the forecasts had lead us to hope. And a thick fog prevented us from seeing very far. We toned down our plans to a short trip south to the Anderson Cliffs and back. We paddled down in the fog with the shore barely visible to our left. We almost missed the Anderson Cliffs in the fog. John and I paddled close to shore to see if we could go behind the rocks. I decided not to and convinced John not to go behind the largest offshore rock here until he had looked at the exit on the other side. I warned him that I remembered it being shallow there and that would make it particularly rough today. When he looked at this spot he agreed to stay offshore with me.
We paddled back to Bear Harbor and some of us went surfing for a while. Lucy is aggressively increasing her skills and experience and had John take her out to practice in the rough water around the Cluster Cone Rocks. She had him rescue her with a T-rescue for practice. They spent some time watching the waves breaking over a submerged rock and timed “washing over” the rock in their kayaks. I took a break from surfing to hang out with them and decided not to try that trick in my fiberglass Coaster. (They both had plastic kayaks). We quit reasonably early again to get dry and warm and start our second pot-luck dinner.
The next morning, our third day on the water, we wanted to do a short trip so everyone could pack up and get home. There are only two directions you can go along the coastline, and two of us had not been to Morgan Rock yet, so we went back north again. This time the waves were rough enough that everyone stayed out of the cave through this rock. Instead we hung out just outside the exit of the cave. When large waves came through, they would blast out the back of the rock and give us a shove! We spent a lot of time here taking turns near the cave so we wouldn’t get shoved into each other. There was a gap between two smaller rocks nearby that had really steep looking waves blasting between them. I paddled closer and closer to this spot and discovered that the waves were not as scary as they looked. Eventually I hung out for a long time between the two rocks and never really got an exciting ride!
We paddled back to Bear Harbor, rolled our gear back to our cars, and started the long drive home.