On July 4th of 2002 I spent a quiet weekend camping on the “Lost Beach” north of Jenner so I started planning to go there again this year. I knew that Jerry Albright often camps on this beach so I considered contacting him to see if he had any plans. Before I got around to doing that he sent me an email invitation to join him on “his” beach. I wrote back joking that I had spent the weekend of the 4th on that beach last year and since he never showed up it was now “my” beach. But I was willing to share so it was OK if he joined me. I arranged to meet Jerry and his friends at Jenner to launch on Friday morning.
Launching from Jenner has the disadvantage that you must somehow get over the spit at the mouth of the Russian River. The easy way is to paddle out the mouth of the river and scare off all the harbor seals that hang out on the beach there. I did this once, felt guilty about it and vowed never to do it again. When I want to get into the ocean from the Russian River, I drag my boat over the spit away from the seals and launch into the waves. Jerry was carrying all the parts for his driftwood fired hot tub and didn’t want to unload his kayak and lug everything across the spit. So he suggested a new strategy. All four of us would raft up near the mouth of the river, hold our paddles next to our boats and drift out past the seals. This way we wouldn’t look like a single kayak and we would not have paddles waving and flashing at the seals. It didn’t work. We drifted into an eddy on the north side of the river and surprised a dozen or so seals that were dozing away from the main heard. They charged into the water causing dozens of, perhaps a hundred, seals on the other side to panic also and jump into the water. All this happened with the Seal Watch volunteers on Goat Rock beach scowling down at us from the south side of the mouth. We figured we had already done all the damage we could so we separated, paddled the last of the river and worked our way out through the surf. I hid my face from the Seal Watch people as a paddled past them.
We had an uneventful paddle north to the Lost Beach. Jerry and his friend Joe watched the rest of us land and then went back out to go fishing. Joe caught a HUGE ling cod which would have supplied enough protein for all of us for the whole weekend if we all hadn’t already brought enough food and some to share. Another friend of Jerry’s, Susan, was already on the beach when we arrived. She had hiked in from the road and waited for us. Another hiker arrived later with her teenaged son to camp for just one night. Finally one last kayaker, Steve, arrived. The beach was a bit more crowded than it was the year before!
I followed Jerry and his friends when they went to set up the hot “tub” and helped out where I could. The tub is really a tarp lining a hole in the sand and rocks. A hose is simply weighted down in a small pool in the trickle of a spring coming down the cliff. From fifteen feet up this generates impressive pressure for washing gear and tarps! A valve controls the flow into the copper pipe that coils through a driftwood fire. The end of the copper pipe hangs over the tarp and fills the “tub”. If the water flows too fast the water doesn’t spend enough time in the coil and comes out lukewarm. If the fire is too hot the water boils in the coils and stops the flow, spitting steam like an espresso machine. I learned all the secrets and took mental notes so I could set it up myself some day. When we took the tub apart at the end of the weekend the parts were hidden up in the cliff so we didn’t have to haul them back out every time.
It took hours to fill the hot tub, so we lazed around most of the time when we were not cooking or eating. This was my plan all along: to bring several books and finish them while I was there. That part of the plan worked perfectly. In the morning we siphoned the cold water out of the tub and re-filled it with new hot water. It was a wonderful way to spend a 3-day holiday weekend.
On the morning of the third day we decided not to warm up the tub but start cleaning up and putting things away for the return home. This had us launching in the afternoon anyway when the wind and the waves were larger. Somehow I ended up being the last person to launch and I had a terrible time. I miss-timed the waves and tried to launch over a large set. A large wave broke and stopped my progress out to sea. I got pushed back, flipped over and dragged back up the sandy beach. My boat stuck in the sand and the returning water roared past me into the next wave. I panicked and exited from my boat, which promptly filled half way up with a ton of sand and water. I spent the next 15 minutes desperately trying to drag it up above the water. All I had to do was relax for a millisecond and the boat slid easily back down into the waves. If I pulled as hard as I could I would make slow progress back up only to have a wave pull the boat out of my hands again. Finally I got it above the reach of the waves, dumped all the water out and scraped out some of the sand.
I was in my Coaster which does not have a forward bulkhead so there were three drybags forward of my foot-pegs. These had come loose of course and almost escaped. We had collected a bunch of trash off the beach and I had a big plastic bottle in my rear hatch. I tossed this back on the beach and moved as much as I could into the rear hatch. I got back in my boat and tried to launch a second time. Again I timed the waves very poorly and found myself knocked back and dragged up the beach. I decided that exiting the boat had been the big mistake last time, so this time I stayed in the boat as long as possible. I managed to roll up or push up off the sand and make several more attempts. On one of these attempts my boat was nearly tossed over the edge of a steep breaking wave. I told Jerry later that I did 4 of my best wild surf landings while trying to launch this one time! The visor on my helmet blew off and I saw it washing up and down in the surf close to shore. While upside down at one point my helmet came off and followed the visor up the beach. Stupid mistake on my part, I must have forgotten to latch the chin strap. For a few seconds the waves calmed down and although I was facing the wrong way I might have been able to back-pedal out to sea. Instead I let a wave push me back up the sand to get out, collect equipment and rest for a while.
I fumbled the boat and it slipped out of my fingers back into the waves! I spent another 15 minutes trying to pull it out of the surf. I became so exhausted that I was wheezing and barely able to catch my breath. At one point the boat almost went out to sea without me. I considered swimming out to it and trying to pull it out past the waves, but I had tossed my paddle up out of reach of the waves. Before I could go get the paddle a large wave picked up the boat and slammed it down on the sand. Later I found the hull cracked at this impact point. Jerry and Steve had been watching and waiting for me and Jerry came close to shore to shout at me. He asked if I needed help and if he should land to assist me. I signaled yes, please come in and help.
While Jerry was landing an extra large wave came in and sucked my paddle off the beach. So instead of helping Jerry land, I was chasing my paddle down the beach. Being very lightweight it stayed outside the dumpers and several times I tried to swim out to get it. But then one wave caught it right and tossed it up the beach behind me. I collected my gear, cleaned some of the sand out and collapsed to rest for a while. I told Jerry that what I probably needed most, besides rest, was for someone with better judgment to tell me when to launch next time. I suggested to him that I had plenty of water left and could simply camp another evening, launching in the morning when the waves were hopefully milder. He was confident that he could shove me out through the waves but then if he had trouble launching by himself he made me promise to come back and join him camping on the beach another night. But Jerry was good at picking the sets. First he pushed me out over a mild set of waves then he jumped in his boat and paddled out in the next mild set. Finally I was on the ocean and ready to paddle home.
This section of coastline, between the Lost Beach and Jenner, is my favorite section of the Sonoma County coastline. There are caves and arches as spectacular as the Mendocino County coastline. But on this day I was feeling fragile and didn’t feel at all like taking chances and poking into caves. I slowly paddled straight back to Jenner. When we got there I remembered one other thing that I didn’t feel like doing: disturbing the harbor seals at the mouth of the Russian River. Joe and his wife had paddled back immediately after launching, and they had already landed. For some reason they had landed way north of the mouth of the Russian River. So far north that they had to haul their camping gear hundreds of meters up the beach before they got to the water in the Russian River. I tried to guess where the water was behind the spit here and paddled closer and closer to shore. While I was there a HUGE set of waves came in and scared me. I backed out over those and watched the water for a while. Nothing that big came in for a long time and it looked easy to land. If you timed it right and missed the next large set. Jerry and Steve had gone straight to the mouth of the river and looked at conditions there. The waves were breaking more gently over the sand bar in front of the river. But there were seals hauled out inside the mouth. The Seal Watch people were still there and they had called for reinforcements. A park ranger truck was parked on the sand. If kayakers landed and scared a hundred seals off the spit this time there was somebody there with the power to issue a ticket for violating the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Jerry and Joe turned back and came by me. They paddled down to look at the place where Joe had landed.
I saw my window in the waves and committed to a landing where I was. For the first time this day I finally predicted the waves correctly and made an easy landing. I pulled my kayak way up out of reach of the waves and waited. Jerry and Steve came back and landed next to me and I helped haul their kayaks above the waves. With three of us working in pairs we were able to carry/drag our kayaks to the river without having to unload them. Then there was a calm paddle up the river and back to our cars.