Those of us who went camping on the Lost Beach north of Jenner on July 4th wanted to go there again. (And again!) But every weekend seemed to have scheduling problems. Finally Jerry Albright chose August 30th and it happened to be a weekend between BASK Skills Clinic events so I was able to go. I called up a friend of mine who does a lot of volunteer work at Fort Ross and asked about getting permission to leave a car at The Fort. There are a couple advantages of parking there. First of all the cove is usually protected and it would be safer to launch and land there. This would mean that Kate DesLauriers, who had wanted to come last time, would finally be able to join us. Second, there isn’t a harbor seal colony at Fort Ross to disturb when you launch. I was eventually put in touch with a ranger who gave me permission to leave a few cars up in the “employee” parking lot overnight on a weekend. At first we were only going to use this option if the swell was rough. The paddle up from Jenner is more interesting and if the water was calm we would do that. But as the date approached, everyone decided to launch from the Fort.
Because I lived closer to the coast than most of the people coming, Kate and I launched early in the morning when the wind and waves are most likely to be calm. We had an uneventful paddle down to the Lost Beach and a reasonably easy landing. We unloaded our boats, moved them above the high tide, set up camp then went to start work on the driftwood fired hot tub. I wasn’t sure I could find all the pieces hidden up in the cliff or that I could remember how to set the system up. But I figured I would do what I could and get things started before Jerry arrived.
It turned out to be reasonably easy to set up by myself. The only hitch was tightening the joints on the copper tubing. I didn’t know where Jerry hid the tool kit so I had to tighten the unions by hand. With water running through them these joints all leaked a little bit but held enough for the system to work. I used an accelerant (white gas stove fuel) to get the fire going and started filling the tub with hot water. When Jerry and a few other people came by they were greeted by the sight of smoke rising from the fire and the tub looking like it would soon be ready to use.
This was only a regular two-day weekend so we spent only one night at the beach. The next morning I wanted to get going early. Since I had set the tub up I was excused from helping to put it away this time. Kate and I got ready as soon as we could but the tide went way out before we did. At low tide the waves were dumping very steeply and looked difficult to get out through. So dressed in our wetsuits and all our gear we waited an hour for the tide to start back up again before we launched. Then Jerry and a few of the other guys came down and helped push us out through the surf. With that help we probably could have easily launched at low tide.