Duncans Landing has a paved trail that zigzags down the cliff to the small beach. Parts of the trail are implemented as stairs, but with a kayak that weighs only 40 lbs, I've been down and back up this trail several times. I say that the kayaking is the upper body part of my exercise program, and getting the kayak to places like this is the lower body exercise. There are a few other small pieces of beach just south of this one that are connected during low tide. The waves in the cove are mild, and it's easy to get in and out. On this trip, I went north around Duncans Point and past Wrights Beach.
Wrights has a long sandy beach with rough looking waves. There are a few big rocks just offshore, but so far I havn't been past here when the waves were calm enough to go around the shoreward side of these. Wrights beach has a State run campground on it, and people with campers can camp right down between the bottom of the cliff and the sandy beach. North of here, the shore gets very rocky and interesting (to a kayaker). It was a challenge to try to go as close to shore as possible, but stay out of the breakers. This is one place where I have mis-judged the waves and been dumped out of the kayak. Shell beach, the next one north, is so rocky that I have never considered launching there. When I first started kayaking, the 3 mile stretch between Duncans Landing and Goat Rock beach seemed like a great distance, so I turned around at Shell Beach and planned on exploring the rest on a trip south from Goat Rock.
When I got back to the cove, there was a couple sitting around a fire and watching the ocean. They invited me over to warm in the fire, and asked about what I was doing. The fire was not necessary in my wetsuit, but I came over to be sociable (and refuse a beer) while I rested for the hike up the zigzag trail. They asked about the bright light in the sky that was already visible (this was an early evening trip on a mild day). I confirmed that it was Jupiter, which I had been aware of because of the comet Shoemaker Levey collision, which was going on all that week. My hosts had wondered if that was Jupiter, and had looked at it with their binoculars the night before. To their suprize, they actually saw a string of little lights around the planet! I told them that this clinched it: They were in fact looking at Jupiter, but those were moons, not comets crashing into the planet. I think they were reasonably pleased to have seen the moons, so it sounds like it was generally an educational experience. We also talked about the comets in the news, and they recalled reading that some new element had been discovered in Jupiter's atmosphere. It was neat to hear this (slightly distorted) from the mouths of "regular folk" on the beach, because this was a discovery of Marty's EUVE satellite!
