Monte Rio to Willow Creek, July 4th 1998.

Maryly Snow was one of the people on the eventful Bodega to Tomales Bay paddle. She wants to gain some more experience with ocean kayaking and came up to visit me. If the weather co-operated we were going to paddle from Russian Gulch Beach to Jenner Beach. Unfortunately on the morning when she arrived the waves were too large and the wind offshore was over 20 knots. Under these conditions we fell back on our backup plan, to paddle down the Russian River from Monte Rio. A few days earlier I had driven across the Bridghaven Bridge and noticed the wind blowing whitecaps up the river. For fear that the wind would be too strong beyond this point, we left a car upstream from the bridge, at Willow Creek. The Willow Creek Campground is actually several kilometers up the river from the creek, it costs a day use fee to park a car there and there is a long carry across a gravel beach to get to the water. So we left my car on the side of the road next to the creek itself where the carry from the water was much shorter.

We launched at the Monte Rio boat ramp had a calm and uneventful paddle down the river with the usual sightings of great blue herons, kingfishers, terns, seals in the water, and one rare green heron. When we got to Willow Creek the wind had still not turned up the river. Maryly has a Scrambler, a sit-on-top kayak from the same company that made mine. We tried switching boats so she could find out if mine tracked better than hers. I was surprised to find that the seat on the Scrambler was so high that I didn’t have to sit in a puddle to paddle it. My Scupper has the bottom of the seat below the water level and I’m always complaining about sitting in the water. But having a seat that low means that my center of gravity is lower and I’m that much more stable in the water.

The wind never came up this afternoon, but we took our boats out and drove down to the ocean from Willow Creek. We looked down at Russian Gulch where we might have launched and several of the beautiful coves south of there. The water looked reasonably calm and not as bad as the weather reports implied. Perhaps we should have hit the ocean instead of the river. We took a short paddle down the river from Jenner then a long walk down Goat Rock Beach. The State Parks system has finally “re-opened” all the parking lots at the top of the cliff that were not actually damaged by the storms months ago. So people are walking down the road to the beach and it is not as private as it has been for the last 4 months. I went to show the road damage to Maryly, but it has actually been scraped and filled in exactly the way I thought it should be. Except they still are not allowing the public to drive on it.

When we got back in the river we could not resist paddling around Penny Island and then paddling most of the way up to Bridghaven to stop at Patty's Rock. We stopped there and climbed up to look at the goose nest I had seen there recently. The goose was no longer sitting on the nest and there were eggshells scattered about. I chose to interpret this to mean that the egg was successfully hatched. We spent too much time on the river and by the time we made it back to Jenner, packed our gear and drove south we were late for a 4th of July BBQ in Oakland. We did see the fireworks at Jack London Square, from the side of a road, looking through the trees.

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