For the last few years I have been scheduling a BASK kayak trip on the Russian River. I always plan it on a full moon so we can paddle to dinner at a nearby restaurant and paddle back by moonlight. Every year I schedule it a little later in the spring to try and catch the ospreys putting on a show feeding their young but I keep missing it. This year I waited until May hoping for more bird activity. I also wanted to have the full moon so I put it off until May 29th. Only after announcing the paddle in the BASK newsletter did I realize I had scheduled it for Memorial Day Weekend. To make sure I got good camping spots on this busy weekend I planned on getting to the campground on Thursday.
I was out of town and came home late in the evening, then had to spend a lot of time running around getting organized. Finally I got to the campground at 7:30 PM to discover that it was already half full. The large campground by the water was already occupied but I moved into number 11, the small pretty one overlooking the river and shaded by trees. To make room for the 12 or 14 people who had expressed an interest, I also “reserved” number 10 nearby, one of the campgrounds in the meadow. The Willow Creek Campground where I do this trip is an “environmental campground” which means there is a short walk from the parking lot, there is no water available and you cannot reserve campsites in advance. Because of the lack of reservations, people like me were driving out two days before Memorial Day, renting the campsites for two extra days, and leaving an empty tent there to hold down the spaces.
I think the park service should allow reservations so people don’t have to do this and so people who really only want to camp for a night won’t arrive to find the campground full of empty tents in unused spaces. I talked to one guy in this situation and let him stay in one of my spaces. Unlike many of the other “advanced scouts”, I actually stayed in the campground on Thursday evening. But Friday morning I went home and tried to get some work done. Friday evening I organized some more kayaking and camping gear then met Roger Lamb at a local Chinese restaurant for dinner before we drove to the campground. Dave Martin set up a tent in campsite number 10 so we actually used both campgrounds that evening.
Saturday morning Roger and I got up early to try and get some paddling done before everyone else arrived. We tried shuttling our boats down to the put-in at the mouth of Willow Creek, several kilometers from the camp. I figured that paddling the boats two kilometers was preferable to the 100 meter walk from the campground parking lot to the nearest water. After shuttling cars to make this work I’m not so sure any more. It took us until 9:00 AM to get organized and in the water so we only had an hour to paddle a short distance before we had to return to meet people arriving. Maryly arrived at 10:00 AM with her new X1 Tsunami kayak. Larry Lemke and Carol Stoker had apparently arrived early the day before in a camper. They didn’t know the campground was an “environmental” one and came in a camper without a tent. A ranger informed them that they were not allowed to stay in the camper even if they were part of a group with a campsite. They had moved the camper to nearby Wrights Beach and came back every day to join us kayaking. John Reed arrived with his son Dylan. Dave’s wife Nancy arrived with their daughter Haley.
The ocean was too rough to consider going out to sea, so we planned a flat water paddle for the rest of the day. Roger, Larry, Carol, Maryly and I paddled 6 kilometers down to Jenner and had lunch at the Seagull Deli. (Locally famous for their clam chowder). Then we paddled the remaining short distance to Goat Rock Beach and went for a walk. From a great distance we looked at the harbor seals hauled out to rear their young. We stood in the surf and talked about the possibilities of launching. Everyone agreed that the best spot was right behind the seals, who were hogging it and abusing the marine mammal protection act to prevent us from easily getting into the ocean. It was a bit windy for an ocean paddle anyway. We went for a walk towards Goat Rock to watch a hang glider hovering back and forth along the cliffs. Then we headed back up the river to the campground to rest until dinner time.
Before we got out of our wetsuits, I demonstrated some of the things I had learned from the Maligiaq Padilla Greenland paddle workshop. With my wooden paddle in Roger’s kayak I was able to demonstrate the resting brace, sweep roll, and sculling roll. Roger got back in his boat and tried out the greenland paddle. He was able to do his normal roll with it but got discouraged trying the Greenland tricks. I took the seat off my Scupper Pro and was finally able to roll it for the first time (once out of four tries). Larry had rented a small sit-on-top surfing boat to try out and was not particularly pleased with it. I tried it out and found that I really liked the combination thigh straps and low seat back. I tried the resting brace and discovered that it was an easy boat to do that in. I shouted “piece of cake!” and rolled that boat over on the right and left side on my first tries. Maryly says I’m disgusting. (She has not learned to roll yet).
Then there was time to get out of our wetsuits and into dry clothes. Once in dry clothes Maryly didn’t want to put her cold wet wetsuit back on just to go to dinner, so we drove back to my house and picked up a canoe. By the time we got back it was time to get organized to leave, and everyone got back onto the water. The morning sky had been clear but had clouded up as the day progressed. I was discouraged that we would not get to see the moon later this evening, but a stiff breeze came up and blew the sky clear again by 8:00 PM as we approached the restaurant. Several people were cold in this breeze and wondered if the moonlight paddle was worth the hassle.
By the time we finished dinner, around 9:30 PM, the wind had died down and the river was calm and flat and beautiful by moonlight. Everyone split up and disappeared into the night and found their own way back to camp. Every once in a while Maryly and I would see something white in the water ahead of us and discover that we had crossed paths with Roger’s kayak again. When we made it back to camp all the other kayaks and canoes were back already.
The next morning there was talk of doing a paddle with a shuttle. Larry and Carol suggested moving a few cars to another put-in on the river and doing a long paddle one way down the river. I suggested going upstream because the wind would help blow us in that direction, especially in the afternoon. Since it took us all morning to get organized this was a good plan. Only Larry and I were organized enough to move cars, so he left his at Monte Rio and I gave him a ride back. Measuring the distance on my odometer I found it was almost ten kilometers, a three hour trip by kayak. Dave and John who had their kids with them decided that a trip that long would bore the little ones so they did a shorter loop up and back to camp. They did get far enough to see the osprey nests in the trees on the wild south shore of the river.
Carol, Larry and I went up the river taking our time and looking for wildlife. There were ospreys sitting on or near several of the nests but we didn’t see any evidence of nesting behavior. I’ll have to do some research and see if I should have the campout earlier next year instead of later. We saw quite a number of other birds; green herons, cormorants, kingfishers, great blue herons and turkey vultures. Larry “invited himself to lunch” and paddled close to a beach with a half a dozen turkey vultures on it. He wanted to find out what they were eating but we forgot to ask him what he learned. I bent Carol’s ear with all the naturalist lore I knew about the local birds we saw. She borrowed my binoculars several times and eventually I stopped asking for them back.
There was one place in the river where the water was so shallow and moving so fast that I could not paddle against it. I jumped out and walked in the shallow water, grabbed the other two sit-inside boats and gave them a shove into slower deeper water. There were two other “rapids” like this that took some work to move against but these we all passed under paddle power. Despite our leisurely pace we made it to Monte Rio a half an hour ahead of schedule making us wonder if we had the distance correct. Checking the map later I found that he distance was correct; we were just faster than we thought.
Since no-one needed a shuttle back to camp, Larry and Carol loaded up their truck and prepared to leave. I would paddle myself back to camp but first we stopped to check out the Memorial Day BBQ going on next to the boat ramp in Monte Rio. Larry and Carol were hungry and decided to buy a dinner and eat it before driving home. I bought a dinner but decided to eat it when I got back to camp. I loaded it into the back hatch of my boat and took off at a sprint to get back to camp before it got cold. I sprinted the entire distance and got a good workout. I didn’t have a watch on me and don’t know how long it took me but the chicken was still luke-warm when I ate it at my picnic table.
A few people left that evening and the next morning (Monday) the rest of us planned to get out of camp by noon. I was the only person left who wanted to get wet, so I broke camp and set out to paddle to Jenner for a clam chowder lunch at the Seagull Deli. They were all out of chowder when I got there and I had to settle for chili. I paddled a round-trip distance of 12 kilometers for that clam chowder and was disappointed! There is a joke that BASK is an eating club with a kayaking disorder. There is a “rule” in BASK that when there is a restaurant, eat in it. We held up the proud BASK tradition by eating out for over half of our meals on this lazy weekend!