After the September 11th terrorist acts, the American people allowed their own government to start imposing many restrictions on themselves. I assume that the terrorists are rolling around with laughter seeing how their act has had the disproportionately large effect of making us destroy our own civil liberties. Another thing we lost was the Coast Guard, which used to be a friendly place where we could get safety information and use their launch facilities. No terrorist ever considered using a Coast Guard station as a terrorist launching point, but now all our Coast Guard stations are barred from honest citizens with fences, zig-zag concrete traffic diverters and unfriendly guards. The formerly friendly helpful Coast Guard rescue boats are being sent to the Mediterranean to rattle sabers instead of saving lives at home.
The beach and boat ramp at Horseshoe Cove on the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge is one of the losses to this meaningless gesture "against terrorism". We are no longer allowed to launch kayaks there. Fortunately, there is a beach with a yacht marina, dragon boat storage, and a bar (The Presidio Yacht Club) just a hundred meters away and we can use their beach. Maryly Snow scheduled a BASK trip to launch there and paddle out into the ebb tide flowing through nearby Yellow Bluff. A large number of "Yellow Bluff virgins" were interested in seeing this infamous rough phenomenon. Maryly invited "seasoned Yellow Bluff veterans" to come along as safety boaters and to show the virgins how it was done.
BASK trips are famous for taking a long time to get started and I was in the water early waiting. With a few other early birds I headed out and turned the corner around the first point. This is a troublesome spot with a strong current you have to fight against until you get into the eddy on the other side. The novices following us all managed to paddle upstream and join us.
Although it was not a very large ebb tide, most of these novices seemed content to hang out at the top of the eddy current and watch the braver kayakers play in the choppy water of the rip current. I found the rip very tame on this day, except for one short period of time when the standing waves suddenly went wild. I was talking to someone at the time and broke off to paddle into the fray as fast as I could. Most of the time the rip was petty mild so I spent a lot of time trying to ride the standing wave behind a submerged rock right where the rip current started. Behind my back people were accusing me of acting like a river kayaker.
I was still there, surfing upstream, when everyone else decided to head back and someone had to come and tell me to turn around and follow the crowd back to the beach. One nice outcome of being booted off the Coast Guard beach for no good reason is that we discovered we could land in front of the Presidio Yacht Club and step inside for a social gathering and a drink after a paddle like this. On this day we where invited to buy tickets to be judges at a chili cook-off!