We were both ready to launch over a wide beach break at the stroke of 7:00 AM. As usual I was eager to get it over with so I started out first. At least this beach had a big soup zone to sit in and wait for a window in the waves. I watched two medium sized waves break in front me and then committed to sprinting offshore. I was lucky and made it without even getting my face wet! When I felt safely far enough offshore I turned around to see that Dick was still in the soup zone. He started to make his run about the time that three huge waves rose up behind me and forced me to backpedal like crazy to keep from being taken back in. Fortunately these monsters broke far from shore, lost energy and Dick made it over their remains with no problems.
We had a long paddle and stayed far from shore for most of the day. When we started to get close to Tillamook Head we turned a little closer to explore the cliffs and hopefully find a place to land for lunch. What looked like a sandy beach, however, turned out to be a boulder beach where we could not land so we ate lunch on the water. Around the first point of Tillamook Head there was a shallow channel behind a cluster of jagged offshore rocks. I watched a few large waves break through this channel then paddled through it. Dick arrived and foolishly followed my lead and also made it without incident. I had my camera ready in case he had some ‘fun’ but it wasn’t necessary.
I started looking for places to camp. On Google maps and the Microsoft Terraserver I had seen several candidate places in Tillamook Head. The first two turned out to be steep slopes of solid rock that just looked like beaches from space. But the third beach turned out to be a beautiful gravel berm beach with several terraces above the high tide line. Dick was unsure about camping on rocks but he soon became a convert and agreed with me about the superiority of camping on gravel over sand. Our gravel beach was around a rocky offshore point from the public “Indian Beach” but completely isolated.