Late on Friday I drove up to Van Damme State Park in Mendocino to join my dive club, JAWS, for a weekend of abalone and SCUBA diving. The water was turbid and the SCUBA diving was not very good, I went on only one tank dive on the whole weekend. The same was true for freediving, but I did manage to catch an abalone for the big meal on Saturday night. The weather was overcast and windy and by Sunday morning almost everyone had enough and people started leaving early. I had my Coaster kayak with me and decided to go for a paddle.
The unsettled weather was starting to show up in larger swell and I wasn’t sure I wanted to go outside into it. So as I left Van Damme Cove, I turned right into the channel behind the rocks. There is this wonderful little channel there that I have been in before. When the waves are rough (but not TOO rough) you can duck into this channel and paddle a ways north behind the protection of some flat topped rocks. Every time it looks like the channel is going to end, it jogs right or left and starts up again. At each of these turns there is a gap in the line of protective rock and waves get in, churning up the water and making things interesting.
I do not recall ever having explored this channel all the way to the end before, so I kept going to see where it would take me. The channel became narrow and shallow in places, but I climbed out of my kayak and carried over these spots. Eventually my canal narrowed down until it was a crack barely wider than my boat with a sudden rise of over a meter above water. A continuous salt water waterfall poured down this drop and I wondered where it was coming from. I stowed my kayak safely above the water and continued on foot.
The waterfall was coming from a large tide pool on top of a flat area of rock connected to shore. The largest waves could just barely splash up onto this but that was enough to keep re-supplying water to pour down the waterfall into the end of the crack. The channel started up again on the other side, but it was open to the northwest swell and waves were breaking violently into it. Even if I carried my kayak over I would have a miserable time launching. This must be the end of the channel!
I turned by boat around in the crack and worked my way back out again. The tide was falling and some of the shallow spots in the channel were going to be more difficult. So in one of the gaps to the outside, I plowed my way out over the breakers into the open ocean. Here I found conditions to be even worse than when I launched, with rising swell and very choppy conditions close to shore. I stayed as close to shore as I dared and worked my way through the chop until I turned into the mouth of Van Damme Cove and in for an easy landing.