My back started hurting on this day, which was not usual. I worried about it but discovered in the afternoon that I had forgotten to clip the seatback into its normal position. It had slipped down and allowed the knob on the rib piece behind the seat to press into my back. I was careful on the following days to clip the seat back in and the problem was solved for the rest of the trip.
I made incredibly fast time, even for a short day of only paddling 15 miles, and made it to San Elijo State Beach by lunch time. I debated skipping this spot and getting ahead by a day. This would mess up all of my reservations and some of them would be hard to re-schedule. I would also have to paddle a total of over 30 miles to get to the next motel on my list, which was way inside a harbor. Eventually I realized that I was only considering skipping the landing only out of fear of the surf launch the following morning. I didn't want to be controlled by my fears so I came in for the landing. A wave picked up the back of the kayak again and the nose dove under to hit bottom. Like the last time, the boat wallowed around and stayed right-side up so I cannot complain. When I looked at the frame after landing I found one joint had popped out but it snapped back together with no problems.
San Elijo is full of ground squirrels that I fear will chew holes in my drybags or even my kayak to get at the smell of food. For some reason none of the campgrounds I've seen in Southern California have "raccoon boxes" for storing your food out of the reach of critters. I guess they figure this is southern California, everyone has a car, there are no bears to pry the cars open so they can safely store food in there. The ground squirrels are so spoiled that when I threw a rock at one of them and missed, the little monster chased the rock expecting it to be a tidbit of food I was tossing him! I put my bag of food inside the kayak, closed all the hatches, put on the cockpit cover and hoped for the best.