Joe Toback scheduled a whale watch paddle in the BASK calendar. Joe is the guy who gave me a ride to my car after I lost my paddle near Salt Point. We have been talking about going on a paddle together ever since, but it never seems to happen. I figured this would finally be the time, but Joe got called away on a business trip and was unable to attend the paddle himself, even when it got postponed by a week for bad weather. Some other time Joe.
Most people were planing on driving down to Monterey early Sunday morning. I hate getting up early and have no problem staying up late, so I drove down the night before and camped in the Veterans Memorial Campground in the middle of Monterey City. I figured on a cold wet winter evening the campground would be nearly empty, but it was still half full. The challenge was to find a campsite that was not a soggy wet swamp from the recent rains. In the morning I talked to one of my neighbors who had chosen a nice looking spot here for her tent a week earlier. When the rain started in earnest that evening, water ran over a foot deep around her tent. As she reached up to pull down the zipper and escape from the rapidly filling tent, it was struck by lightning! She saw the buzzing ends of the lightning running around her hand, the metal parts of the zipper, and the metal tent poles. There is a row of burn marks on her wrist to testify to the experience. The zipper was melted shut trapping her in the tent, however, she didn't want to leave for a while. The rain-fly of the tent was blown up allowing her to see out a mesh panel, and she could see lightning running sideways through the clouds overhead and feared it would strike her again. She sat shivering in the puddle in the half collapsed tent until her son, who was camping with her, came to rescue her. So why were they in this campground again? A golf tournament had come to the area and filled up or doubled the prices of all the motel rooms. And the previous evening had been clear and calm.
For our whale watching paddle, we had clear and calm skies. The ocean was a little rough with ten foot swell but Monterey Bay was sheltered from the brunt of it. The beach behind Lovers Point, where we launched, was well protected and we launched with no problems. Huge waves broke on the exposed rocky shoreline and we were seldom tempted to do any rock gardening. Usually large seas like this bore me because I cannot play close to shore. But on this trip, we had something interesting to look for far from shore: Whales!
Just one hundred meters from shore we saw our first Gray whale! It broke the surface less than fifty meters from us heading out to sea. Several of us backpedaled a little for fear it would come up under us on its way by. We saw it break the surface again farther out to sea and turned to follow it. We saw glimpses of it several more times and even saw its tail swing up out of the water for a deeper dive once. But it slowly pulled ahead and se saw no other whales for a while. We paddled a good distance out to sea and spent some time looking all around and still saw no whales. We talked to some kayakers from Monterey Bay Kayaks who were having a similar experience. The consensus seemed to be that the large pods of adult whales were far from shore, and only the young whales were following the shoreline. We had probably paddled our kayaks out far enough to be between these two routes. So we started back and went closer to shore again.
Part way back I was surprised by a loud explosive blast of air behind me. I turned in time to see the back of a gray whale disappear under the water less than ten meters from me! Another whale rose up for a breath a little farther away. We all stopped and watched for a while, hoping they would come back up again soon. Behind us we watched a bunch of kayakers catching up with us and figured they where in for a pleasant surprise. But those two whales never resurfaced where we could see them. A little later we did see a whale surfacing while going in the opposite direction, so some of our sightings may have been the same whale traveling back and forth along the coastline. In all we are pretty sure we saw five different whales on this day.
When we got back to Lovers Point we kept going for a while and paddled past the Monterey Bay Aquarium to land on a sandy beach to finish our lunches. Several of us cut close to shore behind some rocks looking for an interesting ride to shore. The waves didn't co-operate for me and I missed all the fun, but Penny Wells who wasn't even expecting it suddenly found herself in a braking wave. When we launched to head back I jumped in the water early and sat in that spot waiting for a large wave. I was hoping for a surfing ride back to the sandy beach but it never came. When the last kayak was off the beach I gave up and started to head out through the not-so-rough spot. Then when I was too close to the shallow area where the waves broke, when my boat was turned the wrong way, when there wasn't time to turn around, a large wave finally arrived. I turned half way around before it hit, braced into it, and got a short wild side-surfing ride halfway back to the beach. I ended up surfing a little backwards and worried about missing the beach and ending up on the rocks, but the wave let go of me and let me paddle back out. Everyone who was watching said that it looked like I really got slammed by the wave, but I showed them I only got wet on my left side where I leaned into the breaking water.
We landed at Lovers Point with no problems and loaded all our gear back into the cars. On the drive back north, we all stopped at a Mexican restaurant in Moss Landing called "The Whole Enchilada" and had a great dinner. Then I drove home late at night again through the developing rain storm.
