After passing this point we caught a glimpse of Ocean Beach Park. This is a popular surfing beach that Vandenburg allows the county to use as a park on Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday. They allow people to drive in during daylight hours and use a short stretch of the beach, 200 meters north and south of the old railroad station. Rumor has it that they station a guard at both ends of the allowed area to enforce this rule. This being a Saturday, it was our emergency bail out option if we had to land. It was also a beach we considered landing on to rest for lunch. The swell and the booming waves convinced us that we did not want to try a landing there. Instead we cut straight across to the next point going far offshore from Ocean Beach and shaving a little distance off our day.
All along this coastline we could see tall rocket gantry buildings from the missile launch facility here. Satellites launched here can fly south over the open Pacific and end up with polar orbits that cover the whole world. Satellites launched from Florida have to fly east over the open Atlantic and end up with orbits near the equator. Equatorial orbits never extend very far north. So I’ve always assumed that the facility here at Vandenburg was built to launch spy satellites with polar orbits. Civilian launches sometimes need polar orbits also. My friend Marty Eckert worked here on a UC Berkeley extreme ultraviolet telescope that launched recently. Years ago NASA launched a SEASAT here (water cousin to the LANDSAT). I drove down to watch that launch but it was delayed by a few weeks and I missed it. While I was here I rode my bicycle around on the Vandenburg property and looked up at some of these rocket gantry buildings. It was a kinder gentler America back then and the guards just waved at me from their patrol vehicles. We set our course by heading towards the farthest south gantry building we could see through the hazy air. It seemed to take all day for the first one of these buildings to pass us but suddenly they started passing us one after another.
Point Pedernales has an offshore island named Destroyer Rock which we mistook to be the rock off Point Arguello and congratulated ourselves for rounding the Big Point. Around the next point the seas became large and confused and John commented that this really feels like rounding something impressive. I checked the map and realized he was exactly correct! Each of these big points is actually a complex fractal shape with multiple smaller points. Again the swell made going close to the point out of the question. I had to hold down my desire to rock garden and console myself with taking pictures of rocks with waves rising up in the foreground and rocket fabrication buildings in the background.
All this long hard day paddling we had the prospect of an unknown landing ahead of us. The swell still seemed to be coming very much out of the west and I worried again that it might make landing difficult. Our spirits lifted when we rounded the last sub-point of Point Arguello and the swell lost most of its power. Although the wind and waves were going our way it still seemed to take a very long time to paddle the last seven miles across the bight to Jamala State Beach. There we found reasonably mild surf breaking on a gentile sandy beach. We looked at the rows and rows of RV’s in this overcrowded campground and moved a few hundred meters north. This put us out of sight of the park rangers but back onto what is technically Vandenburg property. We were not visited by Air Force guards in the night so either they didn’t notice us or they left us to sleep in peace.