Yellow Bluff is another fun place to play in a kayak when the tide is ebbing very fast. There is an underwater canyon in the San Francisco Bay right where the water flowing out of Richardson Bay meets the water flowing out of Raccoon Strait. As the water pours over the edge of this canyon the surface goes crazy in what is called a "tide rip". If there are wind waves on top of it the dancing water is supposed to be very impressive but I have yet to get lucky and see this. Fred Cooper had recently initiated a "rough water rescue practice" here on a large ebb. They had all fallen out of their boats on purpose and praciced different methods of getting back in. In one regard this is a great place for practice like this because the water is rough but it is very deep so there is nothing to bang into except other boats. I had not been able to attend the first practice so I was eager to take this second chance. Fred had so many people call who wanted to join this paddle that he had to start turning them down. He wanted to keep the number of boats down so we wouldn't run into each other out there.
We met at Horseshoe Cove and paddled against the current around the first point and into an eddy. The rough water arches out between two points only half a kilometer apart, and an eddy current runs along shore back the other way. Whenever you get tired or scared, all you have to do is turn into the eddy and let it take you back up to the start again! Up at the start of the rough water there was a permanent wave with a dip behind it. I got my boat into this spot many times and managed to surf the standing wave. From this position I could see seaweed waving off a dark spot under the first hump in the water so I knew that this wave was caused by a rock. At first I was able to paddle around the corner, cut across the current, slip back over the hump, and then paddle to catch the standing wave. But as the tide roared out the hump got darker, my boat thumped it a few times, and eventually the hump turned into a rock sticking almost half a meter out of the water! By that time there were a half a dozen other smaller rocks peaking above the surface.
Between rides surfing standing waves, we let the current take us down a ways to ride the rapids before cutting into the calm eddy current. Everyone came to find that going down the rapids backwards was the most fun. In this position you could get small shoves from the waves running upstream. It is surprisingly easy to use these waves to stand still in the rush of the current, or even make headway upstream. At one point I was sitting at the top of the eddy current waiting for Maryly to catch up with me. Someone shouted and pointed out that the waves were suddenly larger. I'm not sure what caused this, perhaps the wake of a supertanker that had gone by minutes ago. But the small waves in the tide rip rose up to almost two meters tall! All the people in small river boats paddled into it at full speed and caught rides on the waves. I paddled into the melee with a combination of excitement and dread. But when I got into the middle of the largest waves they were not as rough as they looked. My boat was difficult to turn and I didn't manage to catch a surfing ride before the large waves disappeared as quickly as they arrived.
As the tide rip started to calm down we returned to Horseshoe Cove to put away our gear and pack up to stop at a nearby micro-brewery. We celebrated the fact that we had "Cheated Death Again"!