From Stillwater to Kolmer Beach is only three miles but it was very dark when we arrived. The moon was above the cliffs shining bright light into our eyes but cast a dark shadow on the beach. Don Barch and I landed blind then helped Donna Fabiano and Dörte Mann find their way onto shore. The beach turned out to be a nice large gravel beach I would like to camp on. There were rocks with little shelves all over them for staging our dinner on. We each brought a pot-luck item to share for dinner.
One thing the beach didn’t have was a lot of driftwood, but I had come prepared with some firewood packed into my kayak. This was good since Don had forgotten to bring a stove to cook his dinner dish and had to use the fire. I had forgotten to bring matches, but Dörte was able to provide those. A real group effort! Dinner with lots of wine was a great success and we hung around the campfire for hours before heading back. We stayed farther offshore on this leg of the paddle to try and avoid most of the thick kelp. I had GPS co-ordinates to find Stillwater but it really wasn’t necessary in the bright moonlight.
When we landed, someone came out the beach with a flashlight to greet us. “Do you realize you are breaking the law? This beach is closed after sunset! Stop where you are and put that kayak down right now!” I had carefully rinsed all the sand of my kayak, had it up on my shoulder and didn’t want to set it down. I stopped as ordered but apparently hesitated too long while I looked for a sand-free spot. The voice became more angry. “I am a ranger. This is a lawful order! You must obey or you could go to jail!” Do they really teach people to talk like this in ranger school? Or do they pick it up from watching cop movies on their own time? I found a patch of seaweed and set the boat down. I don’ know what he thought I was going to do with that kayak, open a packing crate or something.
Don and Dörte didn’t hear the exchange and came by a few seconds later carrying another kayak between them. The voice notched up a little more angrily at them for failing to obey the previous order they had not heard. After we all stopped trying to get our gear off his park he proceeded to give us a lecture about being on his park after sunset. Finally he told us if we hurried up and got off his park he would let us go with a warning this time. Plus $35 tickets each for parking on the side of the county road after sunset. He asked us if we were poachers and surprisingly didn’t check for proof when we said no. He got upset when it took us too long to tell him where we were from, but then got distracted and didn’t ask for details after a few of us mentioned our home towns. He finally left us to get our gear off his park and drove up to park behind our cars. When I walked up to get mine, he moved forward a few yards but didn’t try to talk sense into me again. I guess he was inside his patrol car filling out paperwork for The Report.
During the lecture he did mention that cars with racks on them often mean that someone is poaching or in trouble. If he had lectured us for making him stay up late to make sure we were OK we all would have felt guilty. Giving parking tickets to people you think are in trouble seems a little counter-intuitive to me however. Badgering us about park rules and county parking regulations didn’t make me feel like respecting authority much more. Next time I’ll hide my car on private property. If we had done this, then no-one would have known to wait in ambush for us. The time it takes to cross the beach to get back to the road would have been short enough (shorter without a lecture) that no authority figures would have noticed us.