We got up before sunrise, cooked camping breakfasts (oatmeal, cous-cous, raisins, “cowboy coffee”, hot chocolate) and continued down the “bad dirt road” to San Francisquito. I had driven this road with Penny Wells and Don Fleming two years before. We were told that time that the road had “recently been re-graded”. There were places on that road where we didn’t think our two wheel drive vehicles could have made it back the other way. Several gullies had washed out and certainly had not recently been repaired. People with 4-wheel drive had blazed trails down into the gullies and back up the other side. I had expected this road to be in worse shape two years later, and came prepared with the front differential of my 4-wheel drive truck re-built, a shovel, winch, and tow strap in my tool kit. But when we talked to Senior Guillermo at the restaurant the evening before, he told us that this road was being regularly maintained now! This time the reports turned out to be true! The gullies had all been filled in again, and even the long stretches that had been axle-deep in sand had been filled in with tons of gravel! We saw no-place on this road that a two wheel vehicle could not easily go. There was a lot of washboard and you wanted to take it slowly, but there was no-place that you could get stuck if you stayed on the road.
We arrived at San Francisquito late in the morning and the wind was blowing strong out of the north. Too strong to go paddling even though the float plan that I had written up a week ago said that we would attempt a crossing against the ebb tide to get to Isla San Lorenzo this afternoon. Yeah right! We drove down to the little cove off San Francisquito Bay and looked at the water. Sid Taylor had told us about a Mexican man named Alberto who lived here with his American wife. We walked over to the only house that looked inhabited to ask about the whereabouts of Alberto and discovered that we had already found him. When we told Alberto what we were planning to do, he smiled and said “Good Luck”. He didn’t think we would be able to kayak at all this time of year because the wind blows all day and all night every day. Winter, we were told, is the season of wind. Alberto thought that we should go kayak someplace else, or come back in the fall or spring. Although he admitted that he was not a kayaker and perhaps the two of us would be able to work with these conditions. I had been under the impression that the wind would die down every evening and pick up again in the afternoon. We expected to get our paddling done early in the morning and get off the water before the wind came back. But Alberto told us that the wind did not die down like that in the middle of winter.
We drove over to the San Francisquito Resort, where I had camped before, and had lunch at their restaurant. We didn’t want to try to set up camp in the sand in this wind so we rented a cabaña for the evening. We decided to watch the weather for a day and see what happens. Alberto had invited us back the next morning to listen to the HAM radio weather report at 8:00AM.
With the afternoon off, we drove back out to the bay and hiked out to the lighthouse point. Pelicans, turns, ospreys, falcons and turkey vultures put on a show for us riding the updraft at the edge of the cliff. John had a wind speed meter and measured 25 MPH wind at the beach where we wanted to launch. We climbed down the cliff and back up into the top of the lighthouse. Solar cells here charge a 12V battery then a photo cell turns on a flasher at night. Up on the lighthouse John measured wind at 35 MPH. I suggested that we should have taken up windsurfing.
We returned to our cabaña to read, nap, write in our journals and take lukewarm showers. The showers were an ordeal. First we had to get the manager to light the hot water heater. The magnetic safety switch on the heater was acting up so the manager actually built a little fire inside the bottom of the heater to warm it up until the gas would stay on. The result was a sickly yellow flame with a lot of soot. I noticed that the pipe or manifold that went from the regulator to the burner was burned or corroded away near the top. The gas came out and burned incompletely underneath the “burner” and didn’t look as efficient as it should. But it did warm up the water. After an hour the water was hot enough to take a hot shower, but the wind blew in over the top of the shower stall and chilled you back down again. However, once the ordeal was over it was possible to forget the discomfort and be glad that you were clean again.