I called up Roger Lamb late the night before to see what he was doing. He recently moved to Santa Rosa but we haven’t managed to go paddling together since we became neighbors. He had made plans to go on a BASK paddle out of Horseshoe Cove in the San Francisco Bay. But when I told him that the swell was calming down he jumped at the chance to join me on the open ocean. The prediction was for cloudy skies but when I woke up on Sunday the sky was clear and it stayed clear all day. The swell started out even milder than predicted, less than six feet. I told Roger that we were going to get to go rock gardening!
Fort Ross has a dirt road from the back of the stockade, out to a point, down the side of the cliff, and around to the beach. They normally let you drive your car down to the edge of the beach to unload equipment. It didn’t occur to me that this might be a problem until I saw some traffic cones at the start of this road. The road wasn’t blocked off so we tried it out. The recent winter storms had washed some deep grooves into the road and a small mudslide had dumped across the last turn at the bottom of the cliff. A group of archeologists were working on the old Russian boat-works site and they were blocking the road with their parked cars backed up before the mudslide. We stopped there and slid our boats down the grassy slope the rest of the way. We threw most of our equipment down the same slope and drove back up to the main parking lot to change into wetsuits and leave our car. Then we walked back down and easily launched into the mild water of the cove.
We hugged the shore trying to find some good places to go behind the rocks. We didn’t see many, but did find a few calm beaches that might make good places to land later for lunch. When we paddled past the Timber Cove boat launch facility another kayaker launched there. He was paddling out to do some fishing inside the protected water behind the point. By then the wind was starting to blow and we could see that we were going to have to work hard to get any farther north. As we came around the point out of the protected harbor Roger and I agreed to paddle into the teeth of the wind for a half an hour before we gave up and let the wind blow us back. Our original goal was to go to Stillwater Cove for lunch, but after half an hour of working hard we didn’t make it far enough to reach that beach.
One point short of Stillwater, we hoped to land on a driftwood covered beach we saw from a distance. But when we got closer to this beach, it had rough braking waves around a big rock. The west end of that rock had several gaps behind it that I thought might be calm enough to paddle through. I paddled closer and closer to one of these and decided to try out a landing. I turned into the calmest deepest looking channel, probably only 4 meters wide at the narrowest point between two large rocks. As I approached the narrows a large wave roared up behind me and started to break through the channel. I braced on my right side and tried to keep the boat pointing straight through. The breaker steepened behind me until I was standing almost vertically in the water. The breaker blasted through the narrow channel and then suddenly relaxed and dissipated after it passed through the opening. I found myself in a small cauldron with shallow water and a rocky beach. With my boat standing practically on its nose and no more white water to brace into, I fell out of the boat. Then I quickly climbed back on and had plenty of time to turn the boat around for the next large wave.
That next large wave never came. I calmly paddled back out of the channel with no breakers. Roger had paddled a little farther NW looking for another beach and had missed all the excitement. He watched me easily paddle out and was ready to go in himself when he finally noticed that I was sopping wet. The section of beach he could see was made of large rocks and it didn’t look like a friendly place to land his fiberglass boat. So we decided to turn back and have lunch on a little private beach we had scoped out in Timber Cove. On the way back, I did take one side trip to duck behind some rocks I had seen on the way up. There was a channel behind these rocks that had looked inviting when we slogged by. Trying it out then would have caused me to slip backwards and loose ground to the wind on the trip north. But on the trip south with the wind and waves at my back it seemed more reasonable. Besides, I was already sopping wet so I was willing to take another chance. The transit behind the rocks was choppy but otherwise uneventful, but gave me the feeling that I had put in some rock gardening despite the rough seas.
In twenty minutes the wind and waves blew us back a distance that had taken 45 minutes of hard work to travel. We were soon landed on a warm sunny beach out of the wind to enjoy our lunch. From this beach we watched a sea urchin diver out in the cove. When we were slogging into the wind a small boat had come by to gave us a look- over. This turned out to be a sea urchin diver who saw my yellow helmet bobbing above the waves and wondered if we needed help. As soon as he saw our kayaks he turned away and continued on into the Timber Cove harbor. We talked to him there later and looked over his equipment. He had a compressor with a snorkel on a tall pole above the gasoline engine. He dove down under the boat with that engine running and ahose following him to the bottom. He was under water for over forty-five minutes and I wondered what depth he was at and what nitrogen absorption problems he had to deal with. After our lunch he moved to another location and dove again as we were paddling towards home.
We went out to sea to travel past some offshore rocks we had bypassed on the way north. One of these rocks was the same one that I had once seen Stellars sea lions jumping off. On this day the top of this rock was covered with these beautiful sea lions again. We stayed far enough away this time that they were not startled into leaving their perch. I went around the back side of the rock and tried to get close enough to gather some mussels. I was hoping that the lee of the rock would be calm enough, but this did not turn out to be the case. Then two dark lumps on the top of the lee side of the rock woke up, turned into California sea lions, and started barking at me. I told them they could keep the mussels and backpedaled away from the rock so they didn’t feel threatened enough to jump off.
We continued south with the wind and waves helping us. I looked behind the last few offshore rocks and didn’t see any way I could gather any mussels there, so I hoped that there would be a calm spot inside the Fort Ross Cove. Just inside the point protecting the cove the water was calm enough to let go of my paddle and hold onto the rocks. I put on my old work gloves and pried loose some mussels. Once a few of them were missing the surrounding mussels had less support and I was able to pull of handfuls and soon had my little goody bag half full. By indiscriminately grabbing handfuls like this I ended up with a lot of very small ones that we threw out. But the large wind blown waves coming around the point had me too nervous to be very picky.
When we landed at Fort Ross Cove, the archeologists had put up a keep-out barricade at the top of the road. We carried our boats back up to the grassy slope beneath the road and carried some of our equipment up to the car. Back in our street clothes we drove down the dirt road anyway, removing and replacing the barricades as we went, quickly grabbed our boats and drove back up. We didn’t ask if we could use the road, and nobody told us that we could not.
We had been driving around in Roger’s car all day and when he drove me home I invited him to stay for dinner. Roger cleaned the mussels and separated out a dozen of the best looking ones which we had as an appetizer. I thawed out some abalone, fried it with some oysters dad had in the refrigerator, and put them on top of some pasta with the rest of the steamed mussels and another attempt at making a white sauce. A seafood medley with locally gathered materials.
