It turns out that Konstantin has a Perception Pirouette kayak left over from the days when he used to do a lot of river kayaking. This is exactly the same model river kayak that Roger and I bought for playing in the surf. I called up Konstantin and suggested that we should go to Bolinas and go surfing in our Pirouettes. We made arrangements to do this days in advance of course and then on the day in question we were disappointed with very small swell at sea. I picked Konstantin and his boat up on my way by and we drove down to Bolinas together.
One advantage of going to Bolinas on a day with mild waves is that there are fewer board surfers on the water. We paddled out from the end of Brighton Avenue and started getting rides on the waves just north of the mouth of the lagoon. The place that I normally go surfing here is a shallow area a few hundred meters north of the entrance to the lagoon. But on this day the waves there looked way too mild to consider. The water coming out from the lagoon has deposited a large sand bar that had waves breaking over it. At the north end of this, just north of the few surfers who bothered to come out, we had a pretty good time and got lots of rides.
After a few hours we saw some other kayakers come out from the lagoon. These turned out to be a group of BASKers, including Albert Wang and John Somers. John was using a Greenland paddle like mine! When I started trying to surf with a Greenland paddle people told me I was crazy. John was trying it because the joints in his arm were being stressed in the surf by his regular paddle and he thought a Greenland paddle would be gentler on his bones.
These other BASK kayakers chose to surf on the south side of the mouth of the lagoon and we paddled around to join them for a while. On this side the sand bar was very shallow for a long way then dropped off suddenly into deeper water. This could be very exciting, giving you a sudden shove and then a long ride across the shallow area. Or it could be a little too exciting and dump you upside down in a second, which only happened to me once. I did a combat roll and came back up. Konstantin liked the waves on the other side better and went back over there. I joined him again for a while before we landed and packed up to go home.