I have long wanted to explore Lake Sonoma, which is not very far from where I live. Despite the closeness I have never found the time to do this. So when the Skills Clinic ended up camping here I was happy to be one of the instructors again. Actually the original plan had been to go to Angel Island, or Kirby Cove, or Tomales Bay. But all of these places have reservation systems and we missed them all one at a time. Angel Island lets you reserve campsites 6 months in advance and someone had taken our weekend long before we started our planning. Kirby Cove is a National Park and has a different system, but the day that we had our planning meeting to choose the date turned out to be the day after we could have reserved that weekend at Kirby Cove. This popular spot sells out in seconds on the morning that it opens up for the next month and we were too late. Tomales Bay has a system that does not have a bottleneck at the 1st or the 15th of each month, so they don’t have a gold rush on these days. I called at the very first minute of the day that we should have been able to make a reservation and was refused! It turns out everyone else had called the day before and asked for a 2 day reservation, so they had given away all the campsites a day early! A trick we will have to use next year in order to compete. So Lake Sonoma was our last hope and we were able to get a reservation there.
We all met at a huge boat ramp at a big marina and loaded out boats. We paddled up an arm of the lake and to a group campground at a valley that used to be called Little Warm Springs Creek before it was flooded by the dam. We had a nice relaxing weekend with camping, cooking around the camp-stoves, drinking, and oh yes, some kayak instruction. We explored one of the other branches of the lake the next morning and left for home early in the afternoon on the second day.