It was very fortunate that we found each other because the fog never lifted the rest of the day. We paddled for at least 6 hours in a small circle of water, perhaps 50 yards in diameter, with a dome of nondescript gray over and around us. Without the GPS to tell my progress I could easily have been convinced that we never moved at all. The swell came over my right shoulder and gave the water the illusion of a vague right-to-left movement. This convinced me that I was turning right when I really wasn’t. So without my compass I would have gone in circles all day long. When my compass told me I was off course I would edge my boat, sweep on one side and try to turn. Doing this seemed to have no effect on the water or the sky. The only thing in the universe that changed was the card in the compass turning back on course.
One thing that helped beak the monotony was paddling past small dolphins from time to time. Almost every day we had seen a few of these. They were probably white-sided dolphins but we never saw more of them than the top of their head and dorsal fin so we can’t be sure they had white sides. On some days we would see them but not hear them over the noise of the ocean. On other days we would hear them exhale when they came up to breathe and then catch a glimpse of them if we turned our head fast enough. Enclosed in our little circle of water in the fog it was nice to have a visitor from time to time.
We had a tendency to turn farther and farther from shore and the sound of the surf faded as the day progressed. Finally when my GPS warned me that we were in danger of passing by our goal for the evening we turned east and headed back towards shore. Roger was impressed when the end of the jetty at Gray’s harbor materialized out of the fog. He shouldn’t have been, it was the north jetty and we were supposed to land behind the southern one! Roger joked that this place was called Gray’s Harbor because it was always gray here from the fog. We paddled a short distance along this jetty and found that the fog was an offshore phenomenon, the sky was clear and sunny just a little bit inland. When we could see across the channel we turned and paddled across, clocking 6 miles an hour between our own speed and the tide flooding into the harbor.
The place I had chosen to land at was just inside the back end of the jetty where there was a little curve of gavel beach. It would have been the perfect place to camp with a flat spot in the berm well above the high tide line. However, I crossed over the dune to a building we could see and discovered that we had landed behind the most popular surfing beach for miles around. There were hundreds of cars buzzing around a parking lot and thousands of people on the beach. And of course an army of rangers to manage the location. I talked to one of the surfers in the parking lot and he didn’t think we could get away with camping near here. He suggested going several miles south down the coast. However, this would have required paddling two miles back out past the jetty against the current first and I was reluctant to do this. We made friends with some local people on the beach but still didn’t get any good suggestions. We moved the kayaks closer to the parking lot so we could replenish our supply from the park’s water system. I watched the kayaks while Roger walked over to take care of this. The maintenance people were there and they let him fill our water-bags from the hose instead of having to use the sink in the restroom.
I noticed an area a mile or so farther in along the bay where there were dozens of driftwood structures built by people piling up the abundant local material. This spot was sort of half way between the state park and a Coast Guard station. Perhaps a no-mans land. We moved the kayaks down there, stored our gear in one of the structures, quickly dragged the kayaks behind it and moved in for the evening. It was not an ideal location. A northwest wind came up in the afternoon and blew directly in the mouth of the bay at us. This picked up fine sand and deposited it on all our gear. The wind brought the fog with it, which was a mixed blessing. It made it less likely that we would be seen by someone official but it made the campsite cold and damp. We set our tents up flat inside the corral of the driftwood structure and didn’t raise them until full dark at 9:30 PM.