When we rounded the last sub-point of Point Conception (called Government Point) everything changed. The coast of California runs directly east-west instead of north-south. I had to rotate my chart case sideways on my deck for the rest of the trip. The waters are protected from the predominate northwest swell. The water was so calm we could stop almost anywhere we wished instead of eating lunch on the water and holding our pee in all day. SUVs drove up and down the beaches for miles. There were boats of several sizes everywhere on the water. Surfers, some without wetsuits on, were catching nice looking rides behind Government Point. There were palm trees on the shore and oil platforms several miles offshore. And finally, the water quality was TERRIBLE.
Santa Barbara is an oil producing region, so presumably oil has been seeping out of the ground for millions of years here. Therefore some of this crud in the water is natural. But considering how long people have been pumping oil out of the ground here and considering the whining of the environmental fascists about how close we are to running out of this stuff, you would think that the "natural" seepage would have run dry by now. Rounding Government Point we started seeing thin films of oil on the water. Sometimes this had a strong Diesel smell, other times it smelled like used lubricating oil out of an old truck. Later we saw little brown blobs of tar that stuck to our kayaks and chart cases when the water washed up on our decks. In some places there were large mats of this brown gunk. In other places the water was full of little threads of it. These threads would be picked up by my paddle and run with the water down the shaft under my hands. There I inadvertently ground them onto my skin and the shaft until my hands were stained brown and felt sticky on the paddle.
It occurred to me that if there was this much gunk in the water in northern California, it would be a NATIONAL EMERGENCY. News crews would be photographing it on the beaches. The environmental fascists would be crying about it on TV. The animal rescue people would be scouring the beaches looking for birds and marine mammals to rescue. But since this is Southern California everyone hardly seems to notice it. People bring solvent to the beach to clean tar off their skin and use detergent to clean it off the sides of their boats.
As we passed one group of surfers we saw one guy in a wave-ski, a thing shaped like a surfboard but you sit strapped onto it and paddle it like a kayak. The guy on the wave-ski, Mark, and one of his board surfing friends, Phil, zoomed out to talk to us. Mark turns out to be the owner of Paddle Sports of Santa Barbara and I went and talked to him at his shop a few days later. Both of these guys turned out to be fonts of information about the local beaches. We learned that all the beaches here between Government Point and Gaviota Beach are private land, part of the Holister Ranch. This explains why SUVs are allowed to drive on the sand just above the water. The beaches are patrolled and you have to get permission to be on them, so we were lucky not to be hassled when we stopped a little earlier for lunch. This also means finding a place to "ninja camp" overnight on the beach was going to be difficult. Phil came to our aid and studied my maps. He recommended that we camp at a beach he called Pelican Point just before Gaviota State Beach. Mark assured us that the area near Coal Oil Point where we planned to camp the following night would not be patrolled and we would not be hassled there.
As we approached Gaviota State Beach that afternoon we saw several very nice looking beaches with valleys behind them. One of them was surprisingly empty of people on this holiday weekend. We considered landing there and cooking our dinner on the picnic table. But knowing that this beach had easy access from the road and would be patrolled we passed it by. John and I landed at the recommended Pelican Beach and verified that it did look like it would be dry at high tide. But John thought that there weren’t any good recreation options at this sandy beach. He wanted to go back to the private picnic table or forward to Gaviota State Beach. We would eventually have to stop at Gaviota to re-fill our water-bags so we first proceeded there.
When we arrived at Gaviotoa we found my worst public beach nightmare. We had to run the gauntlet of fishing lines hanging down from the public pier. Then there were hundreds of people hanging out on the small beach on a holiday weekend. Children were screaming and splashing in the water in every inch of the shoreline. A life-guard in his tower stood by scowling at us and ready to fine us for landing "vessels" on a swimming beach. I joked that with three kayaks we should be able to take out dozens of children if we timed our landings right and side-surfed in. Seriously, there was absolutely nothing that I could imagine enjoying about being on this beach. I told John I would rather sit in the sand on Pelican Beach and read a book. I do not understand why all these beachgoers go to places like this. We decided to go back to Pelican Beach and planed on sneaking onto Gaviota Beach in the morning to get some drinking water. John wanted to backtrack all the way to the private beach with the picnic table for dinner, but since we were planning to stay at Pelican Beach anyway he agreed to just land there and camp for the night.
In the middle of the night it became very windy and the fine white sand of Pelican Beach blew into all our equipment. I was the only person who brought a full tent and some of the fine sand was able to blow through the mosquito mesh of my tent and get inside. Fred and John were sleeping in bivy tents with their faces outside and woke up with sand impacted in their eyebrows. I had left my stove set up overnight and the priming pump didn't work well in the morning. Later at home I found a SEVERAL CUBIC CENTEMETERS of sand had blown inside the moving parts of the stove and clogged it up. By morning the wind died down again.