Maryly Snow asked to come up for an ocean paddle in a new boat she was still “breaking in” or getting used to. I suggested rock gardening in the Goat Rock area or paddling around Bodega Head if conditions were bad. We invited Roger Lamb, Genie Bracken in her freshly repaired Coaster, and Konstantin Gortinsky to come along. On the day before Roger and I talked about conditions, which were 7 foot swell with a prediction of 10 feet Saturday afternoon. The day before the swell at Bodega had gone over 13 feet with no warning from the 3 day wave forecast page! We decided that this trip had to be out of Bodega and called everyone to meet us there.
One condition we had forgotten to consider was fog. When we met at Campbell Cove at 10:00 in the morning, the visibility was fluctuating around 500 meters. Maryly didn’t want to go under these conditions for two reasons: 1) It is no fun to go kayaking when you cannot see the scenery around you. And 2) not being able to see on a day with 10 foot swell every 17 seconds (the actual conditions when we arrived) can be dangerous. Konstantin convinced her to go paddling with us anyway under the agreement that we would turn back if the waves forced us to paddle so far out that we could not see the shore through the fog. Roger paddled over from Doran Park to meet us without Genie, who was unable to get away from home in time.
Roger once described his favorite Bodega Bay paddle as paddling south and west around the headland until he got scared and then turning back. We paddled out the jetty and turned south into mild waves that got larger and larger as we passed between Bodega Head and Bodega Rocks. The swell was rising into large waves that broke over the rock to our left. Things are supposed to calm down a little before getting worse over a reef that extends southwest from the head. The swell continued to get larger and larger as we left Bodega Rocks in the fog and headed west. As we approached the reef the waves were rising up and breaking an impressive distance away from Bodega Head on our right. These breakers convinced us to stay farther and farther out until we could not see the land any more. Konstantin noticed this first and suggested that we turn back. Maryly at first thought we were kidding and only suggesting turning back to dash her hopes when we did not! But we really meant it and we really did turn back.
But turning back creates its own fears. It is much easier to paddle into a large wave than it is to turn your back on the ocean and wait for the large one to sneak up on you from behind. Roger called out “OUTSIDE” once to warn us about a big one coming, but it didn’t amount to much. I heard another large wave break for a few seconds behind us and expected it to rise up under us. I suggested to Maryly that she point her boat to the right when a wave arrives so that if it turns out to be too big, she would bet surfed or broached away from the headlands instead of into the rocks. But even my breaking wave calmed down and let us paddle back into the bay.
There we saw Genie materialize out of the fog in front of us! She had managed to get away late and then launched into these conditions by herself! Roger turned around and took her back out into the large waves outside the bay for a few minutes so she didn’t miss out on that experience. The rest of us paddled farther into the bay and turned behind the Bodega Rocks to see if there was something fun to do back there.
It is often possible, even on days with very large swell, to paddle a kayak up behind Bodega Rocks. I wanted Maryly to try out her new boat in choppy conditions like that. When we got behind the rocks this time we I found the water behaving in very strange ways. There was a huge area of foam trapped in the bay with really confused water around it. The confused water acted like a wild-water river or a tidal rip, but there wasn’t very much current to go with it. What current there was seemed to be pushing the foam into a triangular shaped calm area. If you stayed in the foam you were out of the worst (or best, depending on your frame of mind) of the confused water. The choppy water occasionally got much wilder, which we assumed was caused by a larger than usual wave coming around the rocks. But we could barely see the rocks through the fog, so we could no longer see the waves breaking outside the bay any more.
During one of these large sets of choppy water, Konstantin and I charged off into the rough area to enjoy the waves. Some of these got steep enough that they started to break and spill, but I found them mild enough that even the breaking ones never got my face wet. They never stayed steep enough for me to surf them. Maryly stayed behind in the safety of the foamy area and got pissed at us for abandoning her in the middle of the bay. We turned back to her and eventually and convinced her to paddle into the rough stuff for a few minutes.
Even though we were socked in by the fog, we always had a reasonably good idea of where we were in the bay. There were sea lions out on Bodega Rocks barking, and the fog horn at the mouth of the jetty was blasting away. Any time we wanted to head back to the safety of the harbor all we had to do was follow the sound. This is what we did after a few more minutes of playing.
Once inside the jetty, we saw a strange boat anchored next to the main channel. It was low in the water and had what looked like two outboard motors mounted in strange ways. We could see a diver swimming around it, making me worry that I was watching a Zodiac sinking. We paddled over to find out what was going on. The diver laughed at me and chided me for being curious. Up close the “boat” was even stranger looking. It was made out of plastic floats, had two gas compressors mounted on the sides, and a strange ramp sticking out the back and ending in a square mesh bucket hanging in the water. We were told that what we were looking at was a gold panning machine. The owner had been hired to use his machine to dredge the bottom under one of the docks in the harbor for a lost wedding ring. This worked so well that he had found the ring quickly! With the rest of the day before him, he decided to take his rig out to the jetty and use the SNUBA compressor to go diving for crab.