[Paddlewise] Paddling at Night (was How long would you wait - (was Kayaks and Visibility))

PeterO asked: "Why would anyone do such a trip?"

I once paddled in Baja on a moonless, starless, stormy night.  In a double and
two singles four of us paddled into strong winds and huge waves complete with
an occasional big whitecap/breaker that would wash over the kayaks. Certainly
this was not because I wanted to but because it seemed like the best choice at
the time. After being stuck on a dry volcanic cone of an island (Coranado) for
4 days we were very low on good water. The wind had subsided a little so it
was only blowing 25 knots and the seas had smoothed down some (from the
chaotic sea resulting from the constant 35 knot winds with 50+ knot gusts that
had prevailed for several days over the huge fetch of the entire Sea of Cortez
north of us). We had heard the really high winds of another storm were
forecast to return the following day, so after seening that the winds hadn't
increased any (as they usually do in Baja) in the afternoon, we loaded up our
gear and took off to see if the weakest paddler in a single could handle it.
The least experienced paddler was doing okay, so she gave the go ahead and so
we said goodbye to or Island prison and crossed a several miles in big steep
seas to the mainland. The double and other single stood offshore while I went
in and looked for a reasonably protected landing site. There were no really
good ones but I found one place I was pretty sure I could get into through the
surf and clear out the worst of the jagged boulders to make it easier for the
others. That beach was mostly rounded boulders about 1 foot in diameter but
that was better than anything else I had found in cruising along the coast and
searching intently.

Once I had found a landing site, it wasn't easy finding the others. We had
agreed they would hold about 1/4 mile off shore and had VHF radios and call
times planned if we couldn't find each other. The waves were so big that we
couldn't see each other unless we just happened to crest a wave at the same
time. Once we found each other again and I took them to have a look at the
best "landing spot" I could find. We agreed we needed to land and it looked
doable. Unfortuantely, we never thought we would be needing our helmets in the
Sea of Cortez, protected as it was from the ocean swell, so we didn't have
them with us. I went in during a slight lull and following a breaker into the
boulder beach. My kayak slid relatively smoothly up the "beach" on the rounded
boulder tops. Next I cleared and area about thirty feet wide of the worst of
the jagged rocks in it. The couple in the double came in next. They were
surfed by a breaker big enough that they couldn't back off of, but managed to
ride it straight in. I remember the bow loudly bouncing off one boulder after
another but they were in safe and the old NWK Seascape double only suffered
some chips and scratches but no serious damage.

The other single kayak paddler had practiced some in surf on the WA coast with
me and George Gronseth (this was well before George became a kayak instructor)
but we also both knew she wasn't very good at it. At one point in WA, when a
bigger set started to surf her during training, she was climbing out of her
Coaster on the wave crest before it had even capsized. She knew how to roll. I
taught her myself, but she was out of the kayak before it had even capsized.
So in Baja George and I were quite concerned about her landing onto a boulder
beach, through the surf, especially with no helmet on, so we waited for awhile
to try to find a lull in the waves she could slip in through. George was up
high on the beach scanning the waves for a small set and I was standing in the
water about mid-thigh deep so I could try to get her stopped before the water
was shallow enough she might hit her head if she capsized. But not in such
deep water that I couldn't dive to the side if she was going to spear me, or
dive over or under her kayak if she was going to broadside me surfing in
broached. When it looked like we would have a break we motioned for her to
come in now and quickly during the expectred lull. She wasn't paddling nearly
as fast as we hoped she would given the small window of lull. I remember
George saying: "We need to teach her the hummingbird stroke".

As she approached the beach she started to surf on the face of wave that was
destined to become a breaker and was too steep for her to back off. She surfed
it well right down the center of the cleared area, but then she started to
slowly carve a left turn across the face of the wave. She did that very well
too, but she was headed for an area of really big boulders off to my right. As
she passed in front of me I dove forward to try and catch her stern toggle as
she went by but I was a few inches short. The wave broke and she braced into
it just like we had taught her to do. Unfortuantely, the broken wave she
surfed so well swept her sideways into a large doghouse sized square boulder.
She instinctively leaned away from it as she collided squarely with it under
her seat. Her Coaster bounced back off the boulder, lept through the air, and
landed in the water several feet back at sea from the boulder. Amazingly, she
was also still right side up, but was just sitting there doing nothing.
Another breaker was fast approaching and I was struggling through the water to
get to her. The other woman jumped in between the loaded kayak and the big
rock and I screamed at her to get out of there  before she was crushed as I
ran through the knee deep water. When I reached the paddler, she was still
sitting there upright and motionless. She later said she was in a daze,
looking at the deck lines and spraydeck loop thinking that she was supposed to
do something with one of them but was somehow frozen and not reacting or
thinking clearly. I got her under the armspits and dragged her out of the
cockpit. Next George came running up and pulled her kayak back out of the way
just before the next breaker would have slammed it into the rock again.

Amazingly the only damage to the kayak was about a five or six inch long area
of gelcoat flaked off the keel line at the impact site. With everyone okay,
but somewhat adrenaline charged, we made and ate dinner. It was getting
towards dusk (which is very brief that close to the equator as the sun meets
the rising horizon nearly vertically). I was looking around for a place to put
up my tent when George said something like. "We need to paddle". I was taken
aback and asked something like "you want to go back out THERE and paddle in
the dark after going to all this trouble to land here?" He explained his
logic. He thought we should go back to San Bruno, where there would be wate,r
during this short "break" in the weather". After some thought about all our
choices, and if the weather was going to be as predicted, I reluctantly had to
agree. I certainly didn't like that choice. I sure didn't want to have to
leave the short term safety of our hard won rocky beach. But festooned as it
was with big boulders in the surf made by 8-10 foot swells that had built up
over the last several days, if the wind got stronger tomorrow as predicted it
would be even harder to leave it later. Given the steep cliffy 3000-4000 foot
high fault block mountain ridge behind us we sure didn't have the choice of
hiking out even though we had made it to the mainland from our last prison.
Once I saw the logic of Georges suggestion, I suggested that if we were going
to paddle we better get packed and going soon so we could at least have enough
daylight to see our way through the bigger boulders that dotted the surf and
the area beyond it before the near total darkness that was fast approaching
arrived. It was our first trip to Baja and we hadn't ever imagined we might
need helmets in these inland waters protected as they were from the ocean
swell. I certainly didn't want to meet up with any more boulders like the big
doghouse sized one that was already marred with white gelcoat from the last
meeting.

We packed up fast and pushed of the Coaster paddler off into a lull in the
breakers with the instruction to paddle hard until she cleared the break area.
Next George pushed me off the beach giving me a head start that lined me up
straight through the near shore breakers. I sat off shore and signalled George
whenever their were smaller waves going by me. He was going to push the double
off straight into the waves and then jump in while the bow paddler tried to
keep it pointed into the breakers until he could get paddling, but he was
repeatedly frustrated in his attempts as the double would get turned sideways
and he would have to drag the stern back up the round boulders in the area I
had fortunately cleared of jagged ones. Finally, just before the darkness was
complete the double made it through the surf during a lull and managed to miss
all the boulders that were punctuating the surf.

We paddled in near total darkness for 3.5 hours (to go the 3.5 miles into the
wind and waves to a roadhead). We each had a dim light so (without ruining
what little night vision we had) we could stay together even though we had to
stay well apart because of the occasional big breaking whitecaps that could
have slammed us together if we were too near to each other. Two of us soon
began to get seasick (my first and only time ever for that in a kayak). I had
learned on bigger boats to concentrate on the horizon when I started getting
seasick. However, I could barely detect the horizon during my short time on a
wave crest. In those huge steep seas the only time the horizon could be
visible at all was when you were lifted out of the troughs on a wave crest. I
focused on the horizon whenever I could find it and managed to stabilize my
nausea enough not to lose my dinner. The other paddler in a single was getting
sicker and wanted to stop and raft up. We did that but sitting in one place
and being bounced around without a directional component of motion made both
of our seasickness levels rise dramatically so we quickly decided that
separating again and paddling was our best choice. Really it was our only
choice, but I kept that grim fact to myself so as not to frighten anyone
further. If we had sat there rafted up the winds and waves would eventually
have taken across a shallow reef downwind where the conditions were probably
big breakers all the time. That reef pretty much ruled out going down wind
toward Loreto as well. Also as dark as it was, it was better to see the
foaming white crests about to wash over your bow than to only hear them coming
from behind and have to turn to try to see which direction they were coming
from.

We weren't making much progress into that wind and those big seas and to
encourage faster paddling I explained that if we were held to only a speed of
less than one knot it would take a long time to covder the 3.5 miles and it
wouldn't take that much extra energy to add a half knot or knot to our speed
and it could cut the time we had to be out there paddling in half. Although
George was a very strong paddler his partner was not and with the extra
windage of two paddlers and a big double kayak they seemed to be the slowest
even though George was paddling hard. I could have possibly sped up the
Coaster paddler by towing but she was keeping up better than the double.

After some controversy as to where San Bruno was we neared the road head.
George thought we were in danger of passing it up and wanted to travel close
to shore. I was sure of the location from the low spot in the mountains I
could just make out ahead (and the other single boater and I had also seen a
brief light just where I thought it should be). The light turned out to have
been a fire in the back of a deep cave at San Bruno that we had happened to
line up with for an instant. I didn't want to get too close to shore because
of the increased likelyhood of boomers and hidden rocks on or near the surface
there. We compromised and went closer to shore for the last mile or so but not
too close. Heading into the protected but invisible (to us) south facing bay
at San Bruno we had to turn sharply to face one last big wave braking over the
shallows of a bar. I realized the underwater part of the spit that formed the
bay had caused the breaker, turned into the bay after punching through the
breaker, and in minute or two I was surprised by the sound and then feel of my
kayak sliding up the beach I knew should be there soon, but couldn't see in
the pitch black darkness.

We set up camp, and tried to calm down the Coaster paddler. Although I had
been sure I was going to have to tow her at some point (especially if she
became incacitated by sea sickness), which would have been pure hell in those
big steep cresting and breaking waves, but she had been a real trooper through
the darkness, the wind, the breakers and the seasickness, but now, safe on
shore, she went into shock and would tremble violently at times for about an
hour while I held her.

The next morning a couple of kayakers from a university kayak club that was
also camped at the road head came over to ask how we came to be there. We
hadn't been there when they retired, which was well after dark. They would
have heard a car or seen its headlights if we arrived down the rough road
later that night. There were no vehicles but the ones that had been there when
they went to bed, and the one thing they were absolutely sure of was that we
hadn't come from the raging sea last night. Quite a mystery alright. I should
have told them we were from the planet Melmac and our silent space ship had
dropped us off with all our gear for a kayak trip. It might have made about as
much sense to them as coming from the raging sea.

The predicted storm held off for most of the next day and we were able to
paddle back to the next roadhead north where we had left George's old van
(rather than try to hitchike from San Bruno out to the highway and then up the
highway and back in to the coast again to the van as we thought we would need
to do). If we had camped on the boulder beach insead of paddled that night,
the next days paddle would have only been 3.5 miles further (in those calmer
conditions about an hours paddle). The winds and waves did pick up that next
afternoon. Enough so the double capsized in the breaking wind waves coming in
to the nice sandy north facing beach we had departed from. But if we had
camped instead of paddling, I wouldn't have this tale to tell. We did get
stuck for hours in axle deep mud twice before we could leave the area but that
is another story. Goodnight Paddlewisers.
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