When I left for Baja I figured there was no sense in planning to do anything the weekend that I came back. I might be late or I might feel like vegetating after two weeks of kayaking. But I got back a day early and Joe Petolino had a trip scheduled to paddle around Angel Island from Horseshoe Cove. This trip was planned mostly as a plot to bend the statistics being collected in the month of April about the cove.
Horseshoe Cove is the local kayaker name for Horseshoe Bay, which is a little harbor at the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge just inside San Francisco Bay. The cove is part of Fort Baker, which has just been turned over to the National Parks Department. Political in-fighting has been the result. At first the Parks Department seemed very open to public input on the future of the area. They had public meetings and BASK made sure someone was there to represent kayakers at every meeting. Our "demands" were not great. All we wanted was a stretch of beach to launch from and a place to park our cars overnight while camping at places like Angel Island and Kirby Cove. Other groups were demanding expensive things like docking facilities and a new conference center. The park representatives were very interested to "discover" that their harbor was used by kayakers. They promised to include our requests in The Master Plan.
Then when we were about to relax on our laurels, a "NO OVERNIGHT PARKING" sign appeared at Horseshoe Cove. We went back to the next meeting and asked them what was going on! We had specifically asked for overnight parking (which had always been allowed before) and they had promised us it would be included in the plan. But it looked like there already was a plan, and it didn't include overnight parking. Perhaps the public forums were just to make people think they were involved in the process, and The Master Plan had already been designed in a smoke filled room months ago. But no, the people involved in the planning said that they did not know about the new “no parking” signs and promised that those signs would not be enforced.
Finally The Master Plan was settled on and it included mention of access for kayakers. Then when we were about to relax on our laurels, a new series of public input meetings were started. This was the "transportation management planning process" and it turned out that it was run by a group of anti-car fanatics. They had this vision that Horseshoe Cove could be turned into a car-free demonstration project. Cars would not be allowed, except at a free parking lot at the Rodeo Beach off-ramp (3 miles away!) and a free shuttle would take people back and forth. Turns out that one hand of the bureaucracy was still guaranteeing us "access" but the other hand wasn't going to let us get our cars within 3 miles of the access. We could still put our kayaks on the beach, but we had to carry them on our backs for 3 miles first. Unless of course the shuttle has kayak racks on it and will wait while kayakers each load 100 pounds of camping gear on and off. I don't think so.
Kayakers (and yachties and wind surfers and outrigger canoeists) showed up at these transportation meetings and made a lot of noise. The Transportation Management people asked us (and every other group looking for keeping their access) what we could do to help "fund" the type of access that we wanted. For example, the yacht club could charge docking fees. The conference center was self funding since it would be rented out to organizations for meetings. Joe Petolino stood up for kayakers and suggested that he would donate a screwdriver to the National Parks System for removing the "NO OVERNIGHT PARKING" sign. That's all we wanted. The Transportation Management people countered with a suggestion that funding could come from special parking permits and suggested $20.00 per day. This is outrageous to kayakers who currently pay $10.00 to rent a campsite on Angel Island that holds 20 people. So to fill this campground would cost us $200.00 per day in parking! (Assuming two kayaks per car).
Meanwhile the nearby town of Sausalito is suing the National Parks System for planning to put in the conference center and retreat at Horseshoe Cove. The townspeople don't want hundreds of people from the conferences clogging up their streets. The Plan is on hold until the suit plays out and most of us kayakers hope that it stays on hold forever. At the meetings we learned that the Transportation Managers would be surveying the use of the cove during the month of April. A bunch of us independently resolved to use the cove AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE during this month and bend the statistics in favor of kayakers. Joe's trip to circumnavigate Angel Island from Horseshoe Cove was one of those.
The trip around Angel Island was uneventful. We landed on Perles Beach for lunch and then continued around the island. When we came back down through Raccoon Strait we could see whitecaps across the mouth of Richardson Bay and this worried at least one kayaker. But steady paddling into the wind brought us across to the mainland again and we landed at Horseshoe Cove in plenty of time to go out to dinner at a local Mexican Restaurant. We waved to the "survey crew" cars that were collecting statistics about use of the area.