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. *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
Matt wrote an extraordinary account including: >Unfortunately, the broken wave she surfed so well swept >her sideways into a large doghouse sized square boulder. Matt That account had me gripping the seat and exclaiming "Oh no" when you described how the least experienced paddle surfed, broached and was hurled towards the rock. An amazing, inspiring story but not one I'd ever wish to emulate. Thank you and thank heavens you all made it, PeterO *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 12:38 AM, MATT MARINER BROZE <marinerkayaks_at_msn.com>wrote: > PeterO asked: "Why would anyone do such a trip?" > > I once paddled in Baja on a moonless, starless, stormy night. Yikes!!! You should write a book. Oh.... wait..... :) Thanks for a gripping read, Craig *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
On Jul 6, 2009, at 7:14 AM, Craig Jungers wrote: > Yikes!!! > > You should write a book. > > Oh.... wait..... :) One should never become a statistic in one's own book! Paul Montgomery paul_at_paddleandoar.com http://paddleandoar.com *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************
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