Our harsh winter environs

Living in central California has some pretty serious drawbacks. It's incredibly crowded for one. Housing is ridiculously expensive. Road rage is something you at least come to understand if not fight against. One thing that helps make up for some of that is the weather. This past weekend I joined a few fellow club members and braved the elements in an attempt to paddle from Moss Landing down to the beach behind Monterey Bay Kayaks which is aptly located in Monterey.

This paddle is something of a right of passage I guess. The coast along the entire route is pretty much sandy beach backed by dunes so, scenically speaking, it's pretty monotonous. On a direct route it's about a 14 mile paddle, and the point of the thing is to do the thing in a single go. No stopping. Not that you always could. The beach is steep for much of that part of the coast and therefore can be pretty dumpy. So depending on conditions and skills stopping may not be feasible anyway.

I'm not sure it would be possible to even invent better conditions than we had. A hazy day gave us enough sun to keep us smiling and not enough to roast us. Winds were all of 5kts and we had a 5-6 foot WNW swell at about 8 seconds or so. It was...well, it was glorious. One of those I-need-to-do-this-everyday days.

One of the participants arrived about an hour late apparently due to a change of plans and a communication breakdown. As she was getting ready on shore a couple of folks jumped on the water to wait.

You can probably see why they might want to get going as soon as possible, but I decided to wait. We were going to have enough time in the boats today.

Right around the corner from were we put in there's a dock that pretty routinely gets taken over by gobs of California sea lions. If you look closely you can see that there are so many sea lions hauled out on the dock that it's rather sinking.

Some years ago, and I forget when, these guys became a real nuisance in Monterey. Sinking boats, chasing people, stuff like that. Today though it was just a bunch of that noisy sea lion back and forth that sounds something like a holiday dinner when the entire family shows up.

We headed out into Monterey Bay proper and spectacular conditions.

Almost immediately after leaving the entrance to Elkhorn Slough we ran into a bunch of birds clearly excited about something that was almost certainly food. Pictures of a loose group of birds don't really do the groupiness of them justice I think, but there were a whole bunch.

Sadly I'm confident in only identifying a few kind of sea birds, but there were lots of different species represented in this bunch.

After we'd paddled for sometime we ran across another sea bird I can identify, at least in the general sense.

We were a couple of miles or so offshore and, all by himself (or herself, I can't tell) was this guy. I don't know what he was doing although if someone told me he was just enjoying a fine day on the coast I'd totally understand that.

These guys were hanging out just a little further on.

Generally there weren't any other creatures about, at least not that we could see so it was nice to happen upon these guys. It gave the place that sense of life that really makes time on the water quite out of the ordinary, at least for me.

Here's a view of our destination from about the halfway point.

Here's the shore.

And, dead center, here's where we started from.

That's more or less how the rest of the paddle was. Things in front of us got bigger, things behind us got smaller, and things to the left of us went boom with the dumping surf. After about 4 hours and a few minutes some folks get pretty motivated to get off the water. Here's two of our group who rabbited ahead and landed a little while before the rest of us.

And here, finally, is a picture of where we started from a viewed from where we ended at.

Close to the direct center of the far (far, far) shore is were the day started. We ended, as you can see, on a nice beach under a mostly blue sky. We made about 16 miles in 4 hours and 30 minutes. It was a long time to be sitting in the boat and I was, truth be told, pretty happy to get out and stretch my legs.

I don't know if days like this make up entirely for the crowds and cost and noise of California. It helps though. It helps quite a bit.