Paddling to Slide Ranch

2-12-2011 MB
A perfect morning for messing about in a boat, as Toad might say. The sun was rising behind the dragon hill head, and a clear sky. Sun on the cypress and eucalyptus of Spindrift point. Every seventh wave or so led a perceptible train of mildly noisy landfall, but in between it was the kind of lapping that is more East coast than West.
Someone was sleeping underneath the big cypress tree, scrunched down inside a sleeping bag, small boots, hmm
Kayaks on the green tousled grass. I carried the old purple Dancer, scraping under the chain, dodging a pile of brush. Across the un-figured beach, ready for Picasso. Who wrote that story? Alphabet exercises, to get my arms ready, and the tussle to get the spray skirt on. Weakening older hands.
Easy strokes out into the bay, a little strain left hand but the right elbow is fine. Careful not to cock right wrist.
The tide is too high for the blowhole that I call ‘Hina’s Mouth’ to be working. Later, it’s going out now.
Around the point, and in / out of the surge channels there. Enough surge to be exciting but not dangerous. Gull on the rocks, watching skeptically as I come too close, and others fly as I come surging out. Out here, in the open, there is a surge of 3-5 feet up and down the rocks. Purple with a white lace of marine growth. Bright stars of echinoderms, purple, red, orange, blue, more colorful than Asterias forbesi from the Cape.
This rock is about 50 yards offshore, a real little seamount. The bottom is over 30 feet down on all sides. Seaward, there is a kind of basic of rock. In the middle, a deep cleft tide pool. At tides a little higher than this, you can surge up with the wave into the tide pool. In the dry season, the peak of the rock is white and redolent with guano. This time of year, its black brown and smells more of seaweed. A gaggle of cormorants on the rock move nervously away at my approach. The gulls, more phlegmatic or pragmatic. Incredibly neatly white and gray and black, with nicely contrasting yellow bills and pale pink legs. The juveniles, of course, are dressed differently with their belts down around their butts.
The big mussels in the tide pool have died or been eaten, probably both. Replacing them are garlands of gooseneck barnacles and toddler mussels. I guess eventually the mussels win out, but only temporarily. Shards of water coming over the rock top. Incoming outgoing curl and whirl of water around the sides, slipping sliding into and out of the pool, around the rock, the dance of water and land. A perfect dancehall this morning, discrete, delightful, and not dangerous.
I move out to the outside of the rock, near the evanescent bowl that forms as a wave is coming in over the outlying rocks, and still sucking the previous water back across the inner circle. Blicks of the weeds and the anemones, mussels, barnacles, and reticulated sea fans. But this is trumped by the crashing coruscating approach of the new wave, already whipped up into white froth, it comes smooching and crashing and filling and crashing and going every which way with the loud sharp noises that air and water make when they meet on rocks and seaweed. And then, with a loud suck and the whirling tormented movement again, it happens all over.
Past the rock, I decide to just paddle straight on, with the sun behind me, into the landscape and towards the rock that from some angles vaguely looks like an impassive human head with a feather on top. Yes, it probably was called that. I just think of it as Featherhead.
On the Cape this kind of pointedness would be much blunter, and smaller. Up north / down east, Maine was carved by glaciers into shapes very like this, but where we live in Woods Hole, its all moraine, the droppings of rock and sand that fall out when the glacier melts back. The rocks, mostly granite or quartz, are called Erratics, a wonderful name; the biggest of pebbles, sometimes house sized, but basically small pebbles compared to the black basaltic towers of northern California. The smaller boulders here are chunks of that stuff, and it erodes into filigree and scalloped forms that resemble in stone the momentary claws of the sea, as frozen in Hokusai’s ‘Wave at Kanagawa’ painting. It’s volcanic in Hawaii, black, even softer then the basalt, even more easily worked by crab and clam as well as the tireless caresses of sand and sea.
I don’t know as much about the geology as I should. Are we from southern California. Like Pt Reyes? Or did we lie here along our fault, waiting?
Coming up on Featherhead, with glances up to the top of the cliffs, hundreds of feet above. The overlook, between the tide pool mini mountain and Featherhead, is a outcropping of rock, and built into it the concrete pill boxes, once with metal anti bomb covers, that housed the spotting stations that were supposed to see the Japanese fleet coming over the horizon and send coordinates to the gun batteries that also still remain along the Marin Headlands, and the Presidio. Now, sometimes, people are on the narrow paths up there. I will be an almost un-seeable dot on a very large expanse of water, made the more interesting by the Farallones, visible as pointed inserts on the horizon of a clear day.
I come abreast of Featherhead, and let the boat drift in close to the edge of the rock, to ride the mildly surging rollers in over the seaweed buffered rocks covered by each wave, and then back out in curls and swirls as they sweeps on, retreat from the rock, carry me back out to ground lightly, for a moment, perhaps alarming a few dozen barnacles and the occasional anemone tapped by my plastic hull. Another dance, this one also waltz like, definitely in 4/4 time.
Now I can see the trees marking Slide ranch up ahead. Along this shore, there are an entire herd of sea rocks, ranging from small islands to large boulders. Soon the storm that is predicted for next week will start creating the winds that will mound up the ocean and send storm waves surging miles ahead. Soon this stretch ahead will be swept by white capped and caped waves. Soon the weed will be busted and whipped and whapped into a gelatinous slightly brown foam, with enough internal consistency to collect in persistent piles, perhaps even come ashore on a beach where some child will gather up handfuls of delight. Where the wind will break loose chunks and blow them into scurrying foam bunnies. But now the vista is a smooth reflective green surface, with the gentle surge moving white rimmed water around the rocks.
For now, it’s a depthy smooth rise and fall, seen far off as a dream, an illuminated expanse, faintly figured by a wind blowing off the land, swooping down the cliffs, enough to blow me along with the tide towards the Farallones out there miles away. The coming swells approach at a steady and majestic 20 mph or so, and are so long and smooth that they are under me before I know it. Or, closer to shore, pushing me gently but firmly. Or, in a few more feet, taking me by both elbows from behind and marching me at increasingly violent speed towards those very hard rocks that I will splatter on.
I don’t paddle knowingly into that zone. Once, years ago, I found myself in it, and was swept up against the flat face of a rock and spurted straight up until I was so surprised that I almost forgot to even wonder as I came splashing back down, boat and all, newly equipped with a sense of what it feels like to be slapped against a rock and thrust skyward.
Today its dreamy and smooth the sun is climbing higher behind me, this part of the coastline is still in shadow, and the figuration of the rocks is dramatic. Crouching, climbing, submerging, emerging, the moving landscape is magnetic. And look, the mermaid or man herself, paddling up higher to get a better look. Big dog whiskers, the vibrissae that let it check out the edible object in murky water, and the large liquid eyes, apparently with some binocular vision. The seal submerges, but in a routine way, and surfaces several times as we share the same part of ocean. Rocks must be only a few feet deep here, and the bobbing heads of the kelp are all around. The boat bumps and slides across them…not enough to get tangled in. Their necks are child sized, the brown color sometimes chromatic with some kind of diffraction effect. The walls of the rocks are pinkish in many places. Within the pleasing patchwork and filigree, the knobs of gooseneck barnacles, each on a goosey stalk, each grey white head somewhat…well..gooselike. I wonder if you can eat em? Did the Ohlone eat em? And then the seaweed whiskers, drooping green and bulky around the knobs of the sides of rocks. And of course, the mussels, of all sizes, blue black and textural.
It goes like this. Wait for the right wave, then paddle to get on its front, and steer between the rocks where the water is still emptying to meet the wave, then surf down the gentle slope of the break, minimal bracing right to left to swing alongside passing rocks, and bouncing on the breaking turbulence as the wave gradually breaks up among the boulders. Try to stay in water deep enough to avoid stranding, but if it happens, enjoy the sudden rocky solidity, with tipping and sliding, and then the lift and unpredictable instability of the next wave coming to rescue you from the land, suck you back to the safety of the sea.
Sometimes the surge basins are larger, and you can see, in the calm between waves, down to small fish and large anemones, I mean big as sunflowers, with fat jolly tentacles ho ho ho armed with stinging harpoons of course, ready to grab and stab smalls.
Sometimes the basin is woops not really a basin, and I am left hanging between two rocky davits, or sliding down the side of a miniature mountainside. But it’s all so gentle, hard to remember the smashing crashing welter of violence it was once and will become again with the next storm.
I’ve reached Slide Ranch, a little rural commune frozen in time since the 60’s, and still thriving, with grants from state and local agencies to provide rural experiences for school age children, host weekend farm retreats and generally do the kind of things they do. Hurrah for Slide Ranch, may you continue and spread your quiet goaty wisdom far and wide.
And it’s time to turn back. Things to remember: The seagull silhouetted against the glare of the sunlight, standing on that outcropping of rock just a few dramatic feet above the waves. A pair of oyster catchers, piping their alarm to each other, fly off, a bonded pair as they generally are. They look over their shoulders suspiciously as they skibble away up the new rock they have flown to. No pelicans…not any more, not yet. Seasonal.
There are four major attractions on this part of the coast, four that I have found anyway. Just ahead is the Hidden Harbor, a 10 x 20 pool reached by sliding in through a crevice that is 4 feet wide at mid high tide, but narrows above and below. The tension here…if the surge is too high, or the retreat too low, you jam. The reward. towering cliffs, and a place which can only be reached by the sky or the sea.
A little further south, there’s a field of whipped white foam, the kind of a blanket that quiets those water slapping noises you weren’t even aware of until they are gone, a vast and enveloping silence that lasts until you reach the other edge, and the boat slides out into the noisy open water.
Then attraction number 2, the roundabout. The thing here is to get on the wave surge, and just as the wave breaks around the 10 foot cone of rock on the seaward side, turn hard left and follow the surge into the channel between the cone and the cliff, spilling out the landward side in a garland of white water and adrenaline. Miss the turn jam the nose, turn sideways, and hope that you can roll or grab the rock and get upright again. Today, I make the wave, make the turn, and am back on the open water, feeling pretty good.
Next is the cave. This is a real sea cave, no dry beach at low tide here, as you find in China Cove at Pt Lobos. Slurping, glurping, glugging and all the g’s and s-sibilance that a real seacave should have. Fingers extending back into the rocks, and the purple marine growth is even more intense in the dim light. Brilliant starfish and the occasional sea urchin. And the rolling wash of the waves, recreating the choreographed sequence of noise, with the boat rising and falling. Woops, here comes a larger wave, so I paddle to stay in the higher part, avoiding being washed back and jammed into a crack.
Coming out of the cave, it’s back past the little seamount and tide pool, with the now thoroughly nervous birds taking to the water or the air. Back around the point, via the surge channels, and then back to Hina’s Mouth. At this tide, the blowhole works perfectly. A textured voluptuous darkly secret vertical crevice in the rock, and when waves roll in, they trap air, which then gets pressurized and explodes back out in a geyser of spray. Why Hina..the Polynesian goddess of death? Well, according to some stories, when Maui became old and discovered he was mortal, he tried to achieve immortality by crawling back through Hina’s womb. But the giggling of the birds and animals who accompanied Maui everywhere woke Hina, and in anger she crushed him.
So I sit in the kayak, my right hip beginning to pain a little after an hour in the boat, getting sprayed with each wave cycle, and watching the rainbow form briefly in the spray.
Alan