I wanted to schedule something interesting for the BASK calendar and remembered hearing stories about BASK trips to Cuffeys Cove. No-one had done a trip like this in years, so I decided to do an overnight trip to this area of Mendocino County. Between the Navarro River and the town of Elk there is a beautiful section of coastline. Cuffeys Point is an incredible headland with five fingers pointing south. Between two of these fingers is a little beach that I knew BASKers had camped on before.
Originally, I had considered camping at nearby Elk Cove, a few kilometers south of the town of Elk. It is a beautiful cove that has no access from the public road. However, this beach had been in the news recently! A gray whale had died and washed ashore there and people had climbed over the fences and hiked out to look at the whale up close. They had discovered that the private land in this valley has a caretaker and he had chased them all away! I gave up on my dream of camping in this beautiful place and went looking for someplace else.
I talked to the people at Force Ten, a kayak outfitter in Elk, about other camping spots. They assured me that if we just paddled north from Greenwood Cove we would be bound to find someplace suitable. However, they could not offer to let us park cars in their lot or use their kayak wheels to roll our boats down the long trail from Elk to Greenwood Cove. They had a big weekend coming up and said that they would be too busy to help us out in this regard.
I considered parking at the mouth of the Navarro River where there is a State Park campground. But this is a first-come-first-served campground that is very popular with RV drivers and it is usually full every weekend. I have seen so many campers in this spot that there were three huge RVs around each picnic table, like westward wagons circled up at night to defend from Indians. I foolishly continue to be optimistic about the friendly helpful attitude of park rangers, so I made the mistake of calling up the nearest park headquarters and talking to them about the parking situation. I knew better than to tell the ranger what I was really going to do, and told her that we were paddling down to the environmental campground at Manchester State Beach. Even with a legal campground destination in mind, there was nothing they could do for us about parking. They would not allow us to park in the day use area of the Navarro River campground. (It might give other people the idea that they could camp on the beach!) Overnight parking is ONLY allowed across the lot next to the picnic tables. They could only suggest we camp 8 miles up the river in another campground (which also might be full) or leave our cars in a CalTrans area where Highway One crosses over the river. They promised that THEY would not ticket us or tow our cars from this wide spot on the side of the road. But they could not guarantee that CalTrans or the county sheriff would not tow our car away if left there. Nor could they promise that the locals would not trash a car abandoned in such an prominent spot for a few days. We were not reassured.
Everyone drove up to my house the evening before and crashed at my place. Only four of us ended up going on this trip. John Somers in a single boat, Joe Petolino and Marvin Feldman in a double, so it turned out to be possible to put all our boats on Marvin’s van and cram all of us and our gear inside. Then on Saturday morning we left early and drove up to the town of Elk. Between us we had two sets of kayak wheels, so we made two trips and rolled all the kayaks down the long trail to Greenwood Cove. There was a shop on Highway One with closed signs all over it and red construction zone tape around it. We figured no-one would care if our van was parked there for most of a weekend.
The water in the cove was a little rough and I think we all got wet launching into the waves dumping on the beach. But once we paddled behind the rocks north of the cove things calmed down and we were able to do a lot of fun rock gardening! The first and last time I had paddled down into Greenwood Cove from the Navarro River, I had decided not to paddle through the large arch in Warf Rock. This time I went through it several times and got some better pictures. Even though I have only been in this area once, I started remembering caves and arches before we got to them. There is a little cove behind St. Anthony’s Point that can be reached by going through a cave. We went through this and I landed in the calm cove to change film in my camera. While we were there, the Force Ten people came through the same tunnel leading a “cave tour”.
As I recalled from long ago, there are caves between many of the fingers of Cuffeys Point and we went through all of them. Well, there was one cave that was too rough and shallow and long and curved for us to consider it. But John Somers and I spent a lot of time watching waves break in this cave and considering it. (Finally things calmed down the next day and we were both able to run this cave without incident). One of the safer caves goes from the camping beach north and makes it possible to paddle north without going south and all the way around the point. But we all went around the point once just to say that we did it, and to look for more caves.
Before just settling down to camp at Cuffeys Cove, we continued north for a while looking for other places to camp. I found a few other little caves that I had been in before and saw several north facing caves that I had been too afraid to go in last time I was here. This time I was in my Coaster with much better skills than before. While everyone else continued north, I drifted close to these caves and considered it. A cave that faces north is usually too rough to go in on a day with the predominant northwest swell crashing into it. I went for it and ducked into this cave and was rewarded with a wonderful new place to explore! The several caves I had seen from farther out were connected together by a long chamber. Several smaller caves lead south into darkness and the sound of crashing waves. One of the south facing caves had light at the end of it and it looked like it connected with the long chamber farther west. The northwest swell came into the cave, crashed off the walls, and made the water choppy but manageable. The choppy water made a continuous liquid roaring noise that resonated inside the chamber. Light came in through the various openings and diffused around the corners and faded into the dark caves. It was a fantastic place to spend time in!
I paddled out and chased after my friends, who had barely noticed that I was gone. I told them what I had found and they turned back to join me inside. With more kayakers to back each other up, we all went places that I had feared to go alone. Like down the long cave with light at the other end, which did turn and came back out another part of the chamber!
North of the chamber we went around one last point before turning back. This point faced into the northwest swell and had a cave going through the middle of it from west to east. We sat in front of this cave and watched the swell rise up angrily inside. John Somers considered going through this but the rest of us had more sense and talked him out of it. Instead we went around the point to look at the cave from the other side. Here we discovered that the water was very shallow and the waves rose up very high and broke in front of the cave from time to time. John and I paddled down to the mouth of the cave anyway and discovered that when big sets come through the cave they rise up into VERY STEEP semi-circular waves that pushed us back. John got surfed back towards the beach here and decided it was best to skip this cave today. We turned back and went straight to Cuffeys Cove to set up our tents and start cooking dinner.
We had a nice camping meal and lit a bonfire with the little bit of driftwood we could find. There was plenty of palm kelp washed up and dried on the beach, and this stuff looks like thin hard branches that might burn. Once we had a hot wood fire going we were able to get this dried kelp to burn as well. It was smoky and I thought it smelled like burning plastic. Marvin liked the smell and piled more on. Later in the evening, I seemed to have more and more trouble finding a place around the campfire where the smoke did not blow directly in my eyes. I walked away from the group and found that the entire cove was full of smoke from our fire! Apparently the evening breeze blowing from the north was just strong enough to create a little rotor in our south facing cove. The smoke rose up from the fire, cycled back down to us, and got trapped there! I hid in my tent in a foolish attempt to get away from the fumes and went to sleep.
In the morning we lazed about and waited for the sun to make it over the cliffs and down into our little cove. We packed up our gear and headed south. Our goal, after going through the arch in Warf rock again, was to continue south past Greenwood Cove for a while and look for some caves that I had seen only twice before. The sun started to disappear into a fog bank as we launched. The water between Cuffeys and Greenwood Coves was sheltered and calm, but after we passed Greenwood Cove the water became much more exposed and rough. We found some beautiful arches that I had never seen before and braved the rough conditions to go through them. We landed at Elk Cove to have lunch and look at the dead whale there. There was still a huge pile of blubber and seaweed with an impressive rack of ribs sticking out of it. Marvin wanted to take one of these ribs home, but he was in Joe’s double kayak and Joe would not allow one of those smelly things in his boat!
After lunch we agreed to go just another half an hour south looking for the caves. We never found them, but we may have passed them in the fog or seen them and not recognized them with big waves crashing into them. Oh well, with these conditions we could not have gone into them anyway. I went as close to shore as I dared looking for the caves and went over a submerged rock at one point. A wave came up while I was in exactly the wrong spot and the tail of my kayak dropped into the trough of the wave and smacked the rock very hard! I considered asking Joe or Marvin to feel the keel of my boat and tell me if they could find any damage. But they were way ahead of me at the time and I forgot about it when I caught up later.
When we turned back it seemed to take a long time to get back to Elk Cove and an even longer time to return to Greenwood Cove. Later I wished we had inspected the damage to my boat because we probably would have turned back sooner. We went through one more arch in Gunderson Rock and then made our landing. My Coaster kayak seemed awfully heavy when I dragged it up the steep sandy beach. I looked at the tail of the boat and discovered a big chunk missing most of the way through, with the compromised fiberglass leaking water! It was leaking out now but had been leaking in for several hours. Since my experience at Fisk Mill Cove I always have a float-bag inflated inside the rear compartment of my kayak, unless I have it stuffed with camping gear. My camping gear in dry-bags had prevented more water from coming in, doing almost as good a job as a float-bag.
The boat would have been relatively easy to repair. However, I was especially bummed because I was going on a one week business trip and then leaving in less than two weeks for a 12 day kayaking trip in this same boat! When was I going to find the time to do the repair! I lamented about this to Konstantin, who suggested that he had time to do the repair and would work on it while I was out of town. What a friend!