In front of the town of Cayucos we paddled over to watch a kelp harvester in operation. This was probably collecting kelp to feed the abalone at the fish hatchery. They had mowers like hedge trimmers in front of the boat to cut the kelp of below the water and up the sides. Then a conveyor belt pulled the kelp out of the water and dropped it on top of a net. A crane picked up the full nets, cinched them closed and piled them up on deck several layers deep.
The shore turned south here and we saw a pod of dolphins ahead of us. We overtook them and traveled with them for several miles. At one point they became interested in us, rising up to check us out with their eyes. One banged into Konstantin’s boat and splashed him with water as it swam away quickly. I thought they were more graceful than that! The dolphins turned around and patrolled back up Cayucos Beach before we got to Morro Bay.
The sunny day developed thick fog and overcast and we did not see Morro Rock until we were less than a mile away from it. Actually when we did get close enough all we could see was the bottom of the rock, the rest disappeared into the mist. We paddled around the rock, going behind a smaller offshore rock. We turned into the breakwater and started checking out the shore for places to camp.
Konstantin’s wife Linda was going to be at Hearst’s Castle on this day and was going to try to visit us on her way by. There was no good place to get out of the sun on the spit where we planned to camp, which is a State Park and probably off limits to campers So we decided to land at a public dock across the bay in the city of Morro Bay. We changed into street clothes and hung around until 7:00 PM waiting to see in Linda would show up, but she never did. The city park did have water for us to re-fill our water bags, but in retrospect it was not a very nice way to spend the afternoon. We had to practically unpack our boats on the dock to get just some of our stuff out. The city park did not have anyplace to get out of the sun, so we might as well have been camped on the dunes. Sitting around in a tourist town was not our kind of camping trip.
We ordered Chinese take-out food from a nearby restaurant and ate on a picnic table where we could keep our eyes on the boats. Then we put our cold wetsuts back on and paddled across the bay to the spit. We waited until the sun went down behind the dunes before we set up our tents. The evening light on Morro Rock was fantastic. We watched the birds working over the mudflat and went to bed early. We could get an early start in the morning before the State Park rangers noticed we were on their turf.
