I scheduled a camping trip to Willow Creek last year and had a great time with a bunch of other people from BASK. I scheduled it again for the same time this year, as close as possible to a full moon on a weekend in the spring. I checked with the State Park people recently and there was a strong possibility that the park would be “closed”. This just meant that we would have to park somewhere else to paddle in and we would not have to pay for a campsite. I went out to check a few days before the scheduled date and found that the campground had just opened. Parking at the official spot made a lot of logistic problems go away and allowed people to come in at any time and meet the rest of us.
Like last year, Don Fleming and I went out on the Friday before to set up tents and “reserve” the campground the day before. This year two other kayakers came out on Friday and stayed for both evenings. Three other kayakers meet us at the Gold Coast Coffee Company in Duncans Mills for breakfast Saturday morning. Two more arrived at the campsite after lunch and one more before dinner time. So there were nine of us in the campground that evening.
The weather was not as nice as I could have liked. Friday evening was very windy and the people who camped out that night said that the wind never stopped all night long. Saturday the sky was clear and sunny, but the wind kept up all day long. The three kayakers who met us for breakfast had to paddle two miles up the river to get to the coffee shop and then paddle two miles back into the teeth of the wind. They were resting from the ordeal when everyone else was ready to do a short trip. We paddled just far enough up the river to see the valley full of osprey nests. Like last year, the nests were not as busy as I remember from previous years. We heard ospreys calling from places farther up the valley but didn’t see much activity in the nests we could see. A few ospreys flew by from time to time and we saw one spectacular dive into the river. That osprey came out of the water with a large fish in its claws and labored to fly away with it!
Roger, Mac, and myself, (three of the hardiest kayakers) resolved to paddle all the way down the river against the wind and try to get to the ocean. In case we didn’t make it back to camp before dinner, Roger and Mac stopped at the parking lot to get their dinner clothes and money into a drysack. I had done this earlier, so I paddled ahead without them for a while. Paddling down the river first I got to see the wildlife before anyone else had disurbed it. I came around a corner to see two great blue herons sitting on a log. They didn't seem too disturbed to see me this close but I turned to give them some space. This might have worked, but I ran into a submerged log and got stuck on it. Flailing around and trying to free myself I was apparently too allarming and both of the birds flew off.
I saw one bird that I have never seen before! Marty and I have seen mergansers on the river many times but we have always seen female mergansers. They are pretty duck-like birds with rufous heads with crests. The males are supposed to have green heads but we never saw one of those. We wondered about this and tried to find out why we never saw males. Do the males live separately from the females out of season? Do the males look like females out of season and only change color in breeding season? That could explain why we often saw rufous headed mergansers in pairs. It looked like pairs of females, but perhaps one of them was a male out of breeding plumage. But on this day on the river I finally saw male mergansers with the females! They look a lot more duck-like than the females and I'm reasonably sure that one can't be morphed into a female by changing the plumage. The males are mostly white with a very dark green head and a square dark area on the back.
I stopped at Bridgehaven to make reservations at the Sizling Tandoor Restaurant for diner for ten kayakers and to let Roger and Mac catch up with me. It only took us 45 minutes to paddle from the campground to the restaurant even with the strong wind in our faces. The wind was not continuous, it would gust up so strong that you thought it would stop your boat. You could see these gusts coming in advance by the pattern they blew on the surface of the water. Then there would be times when the wind died down to almost calm and you could paddle forward very fast. I turned to paddle near one bank or the other of the river depending on which side I expected to find a wind shadow.
As the three of us headed from the restaurant to the ocean, the wind came up continuously and strong. With my new forward stroke I was able to make continuous progress into the wind but it was a lot of work. It still only took us a little over an hour to paddle the three kilometers to the beach. When we looked over the edge of the spit the beach was a fuzzy blurr of flying sand. Each grain of sand was moving fast enough to sting bare skin and rattle off our sunglasses. Roger and Mac were content to hide behind the old breakwater and didn't need to see the ocean on this trip. I took my anomometer (wind speed meter) up onto the beach to find out that we were facing a 30 MPH wind with gusts up to 35. Once I got halfway across the beach the sand stayed down and I decided to get my feet wet in the ocean.
In front of me in the water I saw something large thin and dark rise up out of the water and sink back down under the waves. I started to hope that I was seeing an orca patrolling the beach for young seals. SOMETHING stuck up out of the water a few more times, like a huge pectoral fin, but it was too big and wide to be from an orca. Eventually I saw the knobby back and dorsal fin of a grey whale, just 15 meters from shore! While I stood mesmerized knee-deep in the surf, the head of a smaller whale rose up out of the water only 10 meters from me in the surf. It was the head of a young grey whale calf who was only six meters long! Roger came halfway over the beach and waved impatiently at me to come back so they could leave. When I explained what I was looking at, he ran over into the surf himself and said he was going to stay there until the whales decided to leave. I ran back to get Mac to come see the whales as well. Despite Roger's intention to stay as long as the whales did, the wind chilled everyone down and we soon turned back to leave.
The wind was now blowing us in the direction we wanted to go and we caught a few rides on the waves it was kicking up the river. My wetsuit had been binding me painfully and I wanted to stop and take it off for a few minutes. So we stopped at Jenner. As we approached, Don and Lata came down to greet us. They had been unwilling to kayak into the wind and had walked all the way to Jenner from the campground. When we told them about the whales, they ran up Highway one until they could look down on the river mouth from above and see the whales. I had planned on visiting with my father who was manning the Jenner Visitor Center, but it was already closed. As we walked around Jenner they rolled the sidewalk up behinnd us and closed down the town. The gift shop and deli closed so we couldn't buy a cup of clam chowder soup. That would have spoiled our apetite for dinner anyway, so we sat on the deli’s deck and talked to Don and Lata when they returned. Roger was eager to leave, but we talked him into staying with us for an hour of sitting around and talking until it was time to leave for dinner.
I didn't want to put my wetsuit back on just to take it off a half an hour later, so I considered paddling back up the river in my swimming trunks. The water had felt blood-warm every time my hands dipped into it all afternoon. Last year at this time I spent all day sitting in the river water, but the air was warmer and not moving as fast then. The wind had died down considerably since we had stopped for therest. I decided to stow the wetsuit and sit in a puddle. But then when we got out on the water we ran into Alan and Evelyn, two otherkayakers who had finally decided to try to make it to the ocean. They almost turned back to follow us but decided to circomnavigate Penny Island in the time remaining before dinner. Roger decided to join them, then I talked Mac into it and we all took the extra time to go back around the island instead of taking the direct and shorter route straight to the restaurant. Sitting in a puddle of cold river water was not that bad and I had a reasonably nice trip around and back to Bridgehaven.
Like last year, we had permission to land at the Bridgehaven Campground to walk up their road to the restaurant. We had a wonderful Indian meal, but this year it cost quite a bit more than last year, about $22.00 per person. Perhaps we could have ordered less food, but it was all wonderful and we did end up eating every last bit of it.
One of the primary purposes of this trip was to paddle back to the campground by moonlight. The weather was perfect for this. The sky had been clear all day and the wind had died down to a mild breeze. The moon had risen while the sun was still up and was high in the sky after dinner. I put my wetsuit back on so that I could thouroughly enjoy the paddle back up river. Don and Lata, who had walked back to the restaruant to meet us, were sorry they didn't take the time to go get their kayaks. Instead they walked back to camp and paddled down to meet us. The rest of us put on our gear and paddled into the night. The moon was high enough that I had trouble seeing it above the brim of my hat. Instead the night just seemed to be glowing from all directions. The bulk of the kayakers zoomed ahead, entirely too fast to appreciate the night in my opinion. I slowed down and crossed over to the north shore of the river to paddle past the steep rocky part of the shoreline. When I came close to the campground I crossed over to make sure the early birds had found the right place to land. Everyone was there except for Roger, who had taken off on his own, perhaps to go down to the ocean and back again.
When I saw everyone was OK, I stayed in my boat and continued upstream for a while. The tide had come in and the water was a few feet higher than the afternoon. This was enough to completely stop the small current that we had seen earlier in the day. I paddled across calm waters to the valley with all the osprey nests. This "valley" had very steep cliffs and it turned out to be in the shadow of the moonlight. I managed to see one osprey nest siloueted against the sky and hear a few ospreys peeping in the darkness. Two great horned owls hooted back and forth to each other along the wild south shore. I saw a few bats against the sky and assumed that there were a lot more in the darkness. I turned and glided back to my tent for a warm night rolled in my sleeping bag.
The next morning had calm air with a little early morning fog that quickly burned off. Almost everyone got in their boats to paddle down to the ocean in these mild conditions and meet for brunch at the Jenner Deli. I did not join them because I had another date: I paddled my kayak three kilometers upstream to my brother's house where we were having a family get together for mothers day. By the time that was over and I paddled back down the river, most of the BASK paddlers had made it back to the parking lot and started home.