Northern Oregon, August 4th to 16th 2007.

After paddling all of the Pacific coast of Washington state last year, I intended to continue paddling down the coast of Oregon. For a while I thought I could not do this trip right away because Charles Harris invited me to paddle the Pacific coast of Baja with him this year. Then Charles decided to do that trip in October and I figured I had time to do half of Oregon in August when the weather should be mild for this kind of trip. At one time I had talked to Dave Harry about joining me for paddling Oregon. He just moved to Oregon several years ago and was interested in exploring the coastline of his adopted home state. Dave, however, is involved in a new job at Oregon State University and could not take the time to join me. Although he did offer to help me shuttle my car. I figured I would end up paddling Northern Oregon solo.

Meanwhile, Dick Ryon was trying to organize a paddle from San Francisco to San Diego. He asked me to join him and I said no. I’ve already paddled all of Southern California and I couldn’t spare the time between all the trips I already had planned for places I haven’t been yet! Dick showed some interest in going on Charles’ Baja trip and even came on our recent practice paddle around Point Arena. Dick decided that paddling Southern California would be safer paddling with someone else and since he could not find anyone to join him he canceled his plans for that trip. So I invited him to join me paddling northern Oregon and he agreed to do that.

We met Friday evening after work at Don Fleming’s house. Don fed us dinner and had agreed to let me store my truck there for two weeks. We loaded all our gear into and onto Dick’s car since it got better gas mileage than mine. Then we drove north until we were too tired to go any farther and stayed in a motel. On Saturday we drove to Florence Oregon where I had arranged to leave a truck in an RV storage lot near the Siuslaw River.

Dave met us there, loaded all our stuff into his truck then drove us north to our launch site. This turned out to take hours longer than I had estimated and I’m extremely grateful to Dave for spending a long day helping us. He dropped us off at the Hammond Marina. I had talked to the harbormaster and verified that camping was allowed. When we arrived with our gear we found a beautiful campsite right on the Columbia River with a little sandy beach to launch from. Dave abandoned us with all our gear. We had no way to get back to Dick’s car except to paddle our kayaks 180 miles down the coast in the next two weeks!