We landed without incident and set up camp. When everyone had their own tent ready we started setting up the hot tub. This year we set it up in the middle of a sandy area. We built a ring of driftwood logs stacked two high and dug sand out of the bottom to fill in the cracks before lining it with a tarp. This was the deepest tub we have ever made and it took a large amount of water to fill it. I cut a hole for the copper coil to enter the steel drum and a slot near the bottom for air inlet and ash removal. I bent a piece of scrap aluminum into a hook for pulling ash and coals out the slot. This vertical drum turned out to be the perfect machine for making coals to cook on. We dropped pieces of wood in the top and pulled coals out the bottom into a slot in the sand between two rows of rock. I cooked dozens of oysters there and Fred barbequed ears of corn. All the while water running through the coils heated up and dribbled into the tub. In previous years we had simply built a huge fire around the coil. The drum allowed us to heat the tub with a much smaller pile of driftwood fuel.
The creek we had chosen runs dry late in the summer and last year we had to move the hot tub 100 yards down the beach. We thought that there would be enough water but while we were soaking the siphon hose started sucking air. I scrambled naked up the cliff and installed a second siphon hose that pulled water from a pool farther up. This supplied so much water in the lower pool that it overflowed. A few hours later both pools ran dry and the flame turned blue-green as the copper coil filled with air and heated up hotter than it has ever been. I jumped up and smothered the fire. It was time to get out of the water and go to bed.
In the morning Fred pointed out and animal he saw running along the beach. This turned out to be a river otter! It climbed up the cliff above our camp and disappeared into the pampas grass. Later that evening when I was the last person sitting around the coals of the campfire, the otter reappeared. It came crashing out of the pampas grass making me think a person was making his way along the edge of the cliff. But when I turned my flashlight on I saw the otter galumph across the sand a few feet from me! It was startled by the flashlight and ran back into the grass at the base of the cliff. I didn’t see or hear it again. In the course of the three days and two nights on Lost Beach we saw many birds, including ospreys flying overhead with fish-in-claw. On the water we saw the spouts and backs of several whales and dolphins going by.
We took our time getting organized on Saturday morning. Breakfast was Don Barch’s famous blueberry pancakes. The waves that hit Lost Beach can be dumpy and a little intimidating so we kept putting off going for a morning paddle. We finally launched around 11:00 AM and despite a fear that the wind would come up, we headed south. This brought us to some interesting rock gardening sooner than going north. In front of Russian Gulch I tried twice to go over a wash-over, fell over and rolled up both times. South of Russian gulch I paddled straight into a cauldron that I have been in many times. It is usually calmer than it looks and I wanted to show my friends that it was safe. Conditions were rougher than I’ve ever seen in there and I did not convince my friends to follow me. In fact, I had a great deal of trouble turning my big 17 foot touring kayak around in there. The water was so choppy that I had to brace continuously and wasn’t stable enough to do the sweep strokes needed to turn around quickly. Finally I turned far enough to zoom back out.
We stopped on a nearby beach for lunch before starting back to camp. We were worried that the wind would come up and make this a difficult trip. But we paddled all the way back in calm conditions until we arrived at Lost Beach. Then just after we landed the wind hit the beach and we could see whitecaps all the way to the horizon. The two who had stayed in camp told us they had seen these whitecaps slowly develop offshore and north of us. They worried that we would get stuck in the wind but we just barely beat it back to the beach.
That afternoon I carefully husbanded the water supply for the hot tub. I climbed up the cliff to the first pool once an hour. If it was running low I siphoned just enough water from the upper pool to fill the lower one and then removed the siphon to conserve the upper pool. Running up and down the cliff all weekend made my calf and thigh muscles sore! Late in the evening I stuffed a reed into the end of that upper siphon hose to slow it down. Next time I’ll bring an extra valve to do this in a more controlled way. Slowing the flow kept the upper pool from draining and overflowing the lower. This made the water last all evening and allowed me to relax in the hot water when it was time for a soak.
On Sunday morning we got up early to break camp. It often takes me hours to take down a tent and pack a kayak, and this time we had the tub to take apart. But with many hands to help we made short work of putting the tub parts away. We were ready to launch in only three hours. Everyone made it off the beach easily and we were paddling north back to Fort Ross where our cars waited for us. The weather forecast I had checked before the weekend predicted strong wind from the north blowing all the fog away. But we launched in fog so thick we worried about being able to navigate. As we paddled north the fog quickly lifted and we had a beautiful paddle past the golden cliffs of the Sonoma Lost Coast. The water was a deep green color clogged with bull kelp and undulating with a smooth gentile swell. The oily smoothness of the water suggested that the forecasted strong wind would not arrive soon. We paddled over the shallow water at the base of the Fort Ross Reef and made an easy landing in Fort Ross Cove.