This was a short day paddling, and it was a good thing! I had been unable to plan the first three days under 27 miles each, so the forth day was only 16 and I looked forward to taking it easy. Early in the day two bottle nosed dolphins surfaced together right next to my kayak! These are bigger dolphins than the ones I normally see in Northern California, although that is sometimes difficult to tell from a distance. Up close I could see just how big they were! Somehow two bathtubs full of water were magically displaced so that they could appear next to me. Their nostrils opened and I could have stuck my fist into those huge gapping holes taking in breath!
I didn't realize I was near Los Angeles International Airport until I went under their flight-path and then looked it up on the map. How could I be in "LA"? I was paddling past a bunch of little towns with quaint names that usually ended in "Beach". Is there actually a little town named "Los Angeles" in the middle of all this? Or is that the name of the megopolos created by all these little towns merged together and named after the whole county?
When I got to the town where I had a motel reservation, Redondo Beach, I did a little exploring. Rather than just land on the beach I went looking in the harbor for a boat ramp. I found lots of private berths and docks but no ramp in the first half of the harbor. If there had been one farther on I figured it was too far from my motel to be worth the trouble. A boat ramp would save me quite a bit of trouble because I could not carry the full boat across a sandy beach. On those beaches I had to unload the kayak near the water, carry the boat across to a parking lot or bike trail, carry the gear and re-pack it in the boat. (It didn't fit many other ways than the way it normally traveled). After rolling to my motel I had to unpack everything for the evening. Then repack in the morning, then unpack to cross the beach again, then repack one last time before the launch. Fred Cooper offered to help schlep gear the next morning.
Fred had called me on my cell phone the evening before. He was meeting a client in LA and offered to take me out to dinner, crash in my motel room, and help schlep the gear to the beach the following morning. I upgraded my room to one with two beds. When Fred arrived we went out for a nice restaurant named "Lupitha's Grill". We had to go there because Lupytha is the name of the doll that Fred had mounted on the bow of his kayak when we paddled across the Sea of Cortez. We had a great time talking over dinner and I told Fred some of the stories from this trip so far.