I wanted to take a new friend, Brenda, on a calm flat kayak trip. Brenda has a kayak, but has not had much experience with it. She had heard interesting things about Drakes Estero so I scheduled a day to meet her at the Johnson’s Oyster Company at the north end of the Estero. We arrived very early in the morning to avoid a low tide in the afternoon. There was a strong, perhaps 10 knot, wind coming out of the south. I had warned Brenda that the only thing that might cancel the trip was wind and there it was. I talked it over with her and suggested that paddling into the wind was good! It might be more work to paddle up-wind, we might not get very far, but when we turned back we would get a free ride back to the cars! She was game so we suited up.
Brenda’s boat looks like a wide slow recreational kayak. However it has hard chines, (ridges along the sides under the waterline), and these made it track reasonably well. She was able to point her boat upwind and make good progress. My tendonitis has improved my forward paddle stroke no end. If I do the stroke exactly right my elbow does not hurt, so my form has improved a lot lately. As a result, paddling into the wind seemed very easy to me and I easily made progress without hardly trying. Brenda thought that paddling up-wind was a great workout.
I let Brenda set the goals. We would paddle until we got to the next point, then turn back. But she kept discovering that she was OK with continuing the paddle, so we set another goal. Once we paddled across the mouth of Home Bay, we fell into the wind shadow of the cliff and were able to turn right and paddle with no wind for a while. But around the corner towards the ocean we came back into the wind and also found a little tide rip. The water was starting to move rapidly out of the Esteros. It had taken us three hours to paddle three miles into the wind, and we decided that it was a good time to turn back.
We headed out across the middle of Drakes Estero with the wind pushing at our backs. As we got farther away from the cliffs the water started to rise up into wind waves. The combination pushed us along at a good clip, and it only took us 30 minutes to return back to the parking lot. Along the way we both got at least one good ride on a wind wave for a few seconds. We made it safely back to shore, and I introduced Brenda to the chant "Cheated Death Again", oft repeated at the end of a paddle in less than ideal conditions. I congratulated her for coming out on a day when others would have stayed at home, and missed all the fun!