The graduates of this years BASK Skills Clinic planned a graduation paddle and dinner. We met in the little town of Port Costa to paddle up the Carquinez Strait. Port Costa is a town where I have stopped many times on BASK trips to go to “The Warehouse” bar, but have never launched from there. Launching from this place requires carrying our kayaks across the active railroad tracks with trains roaring past every so often.
We were originally supposed to paddle up the strait to the Benicia-Martinez bridge with the flood tide and come back two hours later during the slack. Sitting on the water waiting for the last few people to get ready we noticed that the wind was blowing up the strait. The planners of the trip became worried that the wind was going to be worse in a few hours, so they changed the plan. Instead we paddled against the wind and the tide, with the hope that the wind would help blow us home later.
We went under the Carquinez Bridge and kept going for four kilometers or more. There were 25 paddlers on this trip and all but two of us went under a large pier at Davis Point. Just one other paddler and I went the long way around the super-tanker docked at the end of the pier. Everyone else reported that they were not yelled at by guards when they went underneath. Past the pier we started looking for a little beach to land at for lunch. Several people landed at rocky beaches and climbed up to find a huge expanse of acres and acres of asphalt black-top. We decided that this must be the cap on an industrial waste site. Despite that, one small group of kayakers landed there and sat down for lunch, saying later that the black surface made for a warm place to eat. I joked that what they might have been feeling was the residual radiation.
The rest of us turned back and crossed over to the far side of the strait as we went back under the Carquinez Bridge. We searched the shore for a good place to land and didn’t see one. There are parks in Benicia, but those were yet another 3 or 4 kilometers away, as far as returning back to Port Costa. So one group split off and did just that. We accused them of going back and hanging out “belly up” to the bar for the next three hours until we were all supposed to meet for dinner. Instead, the small remaining group landed in some rocks on Dillon Point and ate our lunch there. This turned out to be some kind of park with trails running along the water. No good launching or landing spots however.
After lunch we hugged the shore past a marshy area and explored the shore of Benicia, noting all the little parks that did have good access for future kayak launches. I pulled ahead, and suddenly discovered that all my friends had turned and were already crossing over to Port Costa. When I caught up and landed with everyone else, I warned them that we still had one more dangerous crossing to make: Crossing the railroad tracks to carry our boats back to our cars.