Pelican Beach to Naples, September 6th 2004.

On our private beach we were able to sleep in late again. We packed up and launched after 9:00 AM and approached Gaviota State Beach for the second time. Although it seemed late in the morning to me the beach was mostly deserted and the lifeguard was not on duty. We landed without smacking into any children or getting hassled. Fred stayed with the boats while John and I went looking for a water faucet that worked. We had last filled our water-bags at Pismo Beach and it had not been very good tasting water. When we boiled Pismo water, a white precipitate settled out in the bottom of the pot. I was suspicious and didn’t dump the water out of my canteen until I had tasted the water at Gaviota. Sure enough the water there had a different bad taste and I decided to keep the Pismo Beach water in my canteen. The new bad taste was strongly of iron and we talked to a camper who said it made his coffee taste terrible. When John returned with two bags of this iron rich water, he warned Fred that placing these bags in the kayaks was going to offset our deck compasses.

When I asked Mark a few days ago about patrols on Coal Oil Point he told us that it was a good place to ninja camp. But looking on the maps later I realized that the place I was planning on camping was a little cove on a point named Naples before Coal Oil Point. On the highway maps there is a dot here as if this was a town but the topographic maps showed that most of the structures in this "town" were oil storage tanks. Just east of where we landed for the evening there was an old pier with an oil well at the end of it. I had assumed that this was an old dried out well, but we saw a lot of activity . Cars drove back and forth to the end of the pier and boats came in and out. I came to the conclusion that the oil company was using this as a dock for transferring crews to the offshore oil rigs. We were a little concerned about all this activity and worried that they would notice us on their beach. Either they did not or if they noticed they did not care since we were left in peace for the night.

Rounding Naples was when we saw the worst water quality so as soon as I landed I scrubbed the tar off my hands in the sand. I also tried sanding the sticky feeling off the shaft of my paddle. This beach had several different types of terrain. Above the sandy beach there was a field of cobble on the left, and a short bluff to a flat valley on the right. The valley was full of trees that came surprisingly close to the water. A few feet back from the edge of the bluff there was a row of posts with NO TRESSPASSING signs. These signs are not apparent in the California Coastal Records picture that I used to choose this camping spot.

Fred says that we settled down for the evening like the three little pigs: I hate camping on sand and this was the first beach we landed on that had cobble. I cleared the larger rocks out of a small area, set up my tent and was a happy camper sleeping on rocks. John collected a bunch of driftwood and arranged them into a flat nest to set his bivy sack up in and he was a happy camper sleeping on wood. Fred set his bivy sack up on the hard dirt on the edge of the bluff and he was a happy camper sleeping on sand. Then “We huffed and we puffed and we snored all night long”.