Not every weekend on the beach in
Oregon can be warm and sunny. If they were, then the Californians
would probably sue. So, in order to be left in peace by those sun
whiners, it is fair and right that we have a goodly share of God
Awful cold, windy, rainy, foggy weekends on the Oregon Coast.
Why, we had one just last weekend. This
happened to be the weekend that my partner and I had rented a Yurt
out at Nehalem Beach State Park and had signed up to host a paddle
for our Kayak Portland Meetup club thingee.
View Tillamook HIgh Tide Paddle in a larger map
We went up Friday night, right after
work. It was already rainy and having the promise of cold. But that
does make for light traffic on the main drag out to the beach. We
stopped at camp 18 for dinner. A fun place, Camp
18. It is a restaurant and museum that pays homage to the
steampunk generation of planned deforestation that was the lumber
industry in the early 1900s. The place itself is a huge log cabin.
Huge in so many ways. The most impressive is the main pillars and
beam of the place are made from (what I assume) is one HUGE tree. I
mean HUGE. The sign says that it is the largest roof rafter beam made
from a single tree in the ENTIRE UNIVERSE. Why does my Cap Lock keep
getting stuck?
Here is a picture of the beam. Hard to
get a feeling for the size of the thing. I am guessing it would take
three people to join hands and reach around the thing. The restaurant
has good american eating. You know, steaks, potatoes, chickens, Liver
and Onions. My partner had the beef stew and corn bread (a humongous
slice) and I had Pot Roast (and a lot of her corn bread).
After dinner we hurried out into the
dark, it was raining pretty hard by now. I was driving my trusty
Subaru Forester with 2 sea kayaks and a fully loaded sky box up on my
Yakima rails. I was a little worried about wind and stability, but
really didn't have any problem at all (and the wind was howling
some). When we hit the coast, the wind stopped, but the fog rolled
in. It was pretty thick right along where Neahkahnie Mountain is. Had
to go very slow as I would have looked very silly going over the
cliff. The kayaks probably would have kept the car floating
(submerged) upright with our frozen bodies inside. Probably not as
much fun as it sounds.
And then you pass Manzanita beach and
there you are at the little gas station that guards the little side
road that leads to Nehalem Bay State Park. I like this park. It is
out on a sand spit that guards the bay we intended to paddle in
tomorrow and it is filled with sand dunes and scrub oak. We had a
yurt this time around and the park host had turned on the heat and
the lights and left the key sitting on the table.
What? You have never stayed in a yurt?
You don't even now what a yurt is?
Well, a yurt is a traditional dwelling
for nomadic people that live in the colder climes of the Eurasian
continent. It is a round building with poles in a circle holding up a
circular roof with a round hole in the very middle. No poles in the
middle. Then you wrap the outer circle in lattice and put canvas
(well, perhaps Mammoth skins) around the entire thing. In the center,
then, you would have your communal fire, and since it was round,
everyone could be close to the fire and you don't have to kill your
brother-in-law for his better place.
These yurts don't have a fire in the
middle, but they do have a queen bunk bed and a futon couch that
folds into a queen bed, a square table, a heater, and some lights.
So, a good place to get out of the rain and cold and have a nice dry
sleep. Perhaps even a game of Cribbage. No bathrooms or running water
or cooking in the yurts, thank you very much.
Out front is a picnic table and enough
of a covered porch to keep half of the picnic table to stay dry if the wind
would just quit blowing dammit !! You really need to bring a huge
blue tarp and set it up over the front of the yurt if you expect to
be able to do some protected cooking out there. Besides, there is
nothing that your yurt neighbors like more than to see a huge blue
amorphous tarp stretched across the yurt next to them. Just like
being back home !!
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| See How Pretty? |
We got in sort of late so we just went
to bed, but when we woke up in the morning, our friend Chip was
parked across the way, asleep, in his adventure-mobile. We got some
breakfast going (which means that I boiled water). Did you know that
if you leave your partner's nifty camp percolator at home, after he
hands it to you to pack, because “you didn't need it because you have your
handy drip maker” and filters, only you didn't bring your drip
thing, that you can make your own drip thing by borrowing your
partners pocket knife and carving up his empty beer can from the
night before? Well, you can. Just be careful not to cut yourself
because though your partner might like to give you shit, he surely
doesn't want you to be hurt, nor get blood all over his expensive
Russlock Case
knife.
Anyway, We drank our coffee and ate our
toasted bagels and looked out on the day. It was rainy and wet. “
Gonna need to put up a blue tarp to
stay dry on the porch” Observed Chip.
“Yep, “ I replied, “This sure is
mighty good coffee”.
“Yep”
At this time I would like to mention
some of the other visitors to the park that weekend. When I got up
during the night to answer the call of the wild I ran into a little
pack of Racoons. They were hanging out in the bushes and pretty much
ignored me when I walked up to them and shined my flashlight on them.
We also had a flock of deer that would wander through the area at
different times. We saw them in the afternoon, and the evening, and
then the next morning. The also didn't seem to care that we were
there as long as we didn't walk to aggressively in their direction.
Enough fauna watching. Time for
adventure. We went out to the launch site, out on the river side of
the park, and checked things out. It was very windy. And Raining. And
Cold. And I decided that it just wasn't safe enough for group event
at 10:00. So I cancelled it. So much for Adventure.
Besides, most everybody except the 3 of
us had cancelled already.
But still. We three had come all of
this way and had hauled our kayaks and our cold weather gear and all
and...... we could go out and just be careful, right? Sure we could.
The Tide was very high and just
starting to ebb when we put our kayaks in at the launch. The wind was
still whipping up pretty high and a little rain shower pelted through
just as we were starting out. We put on our hats (they should have
been rain hats, but I couldn't find mine so I am wearing a wool watch
cap) and headed up into the bay.
Chip and I have done this paddle
before,
and even though that was also a rainy cold weekend, the weather out
on the bay that time was much....... less complex. So, with the wind
and down (up?) the bay we go. The tide is high. The tide is really
high. I remember these logs as being in the mud, but now this one is
actually floating (I am supposed to remember to put a picture in
here).
Well, good. That means more water under our buts and more time to make it through the not at all there at low tide channel over to the main part of the river. That is our float plan.
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| My partner reminded me to add this. |
Well, good. That means more water under our buts and more time to make it through the not at all there at low tide channel over to the main part of the river. That is our float plan.
But. When the water is this high, you
can't see where the channels are! Everything thing is big wide water
bay. A big wide water bay that, with the wind at our backs and the
wind waves giving us a good little surf east, we crossed quickly.
Those wind waves also made for a little excitement. These are the
times when my Partner says things like “ How you doin, Jon?” and
“I want my kayak partners to stay close to me in case I flip over “
, when what she really means is she wants me to stay close in case I flip
over.
Fair enough.
But we couldn't find the channel and we
ran up into the low land marsh area that is on the East side of the
bay. I could tell that the channel was off to the north a bit, over
by the cliffs, but how to get there? As mentioned before, the tide
was very high, and it look like there was enough water over the top
of the marsh that we could just paddle right over it. So that is what
I did. Well, that is what I ¾ did. I got stuck . Dammit. I turned
around to tell my partner that we couldn't make it this way, but she
was way the hell back by open water waiting for me to turn around.
Damn. She didn't trust me. Chip and I got back out to her and she had
found a more open channel running up through the marsh. She didn't
like it. The current was starting to move now and she has had a bad
experience with taking a 17 foot sea kayak up a windy little current
before.
Not fun. But..... she tried it anyway. We finally got to a place
where she just didn't want to continue. I said, “Beach and stand
up. You should be able to see where the current goes.”. So she did.
She couldn't see anything. So we decided to go back with the current
out to the bay. If you look on the map, you can see where we turned
around. Good thing we did. The outgoing tide would have stranded us.
The funny thing about that channel is how deep to it was. I know
that when the tide is at medium, the grass is like a couple of feet
over your head. The channel was only like 6 foot wide, but it was
deeper than the length of my paddle.
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| Action Adventure Girl |
Out in the main bay the wind was in our
face and the waves were building up again. There was a group of
stranded tree logs a few hundred yards away and I thought they looked
like the trees where we had seen the eagles on a previous excursion.
Chip didn't think so. But I really think so. I am provided
photographic evidence of my inherent correctocity.
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| Low Tide |
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| High Tide. The Eagles are underwater |
Once past those snags I knew we were in
the channel, and, in truth, we could now see around the marsh grass
up to the cliff of land that runs south into the bay from the town of
Nehalem. Once more the wind pushed us quickly up this channel. My
partner was getting a little cold and tired and we decided to beach
and have a rest and a Cliff Bar. I had holiday flavors: Pecan Pie
and...... and.... oh, other things. I had the Pecan pie. We parked
right by this little stretch of sand and live trees and.... a park
bench? We discussed our plan. To continue on to the river, or to head
back?
My partner thought we could go to the
river and then ride the tide down the south side of the river and
cross over the main channel close to the boat ramp where are cars are
parked. I didn't like this idea. I didn't like the idea of the
exposed crossing where outgoing river and tide meet incoming wind and
wave. I wimped out. All of us agreed that we had been paddling
downhill for the last hour or so and we had a long way back slugging
upwind to get to where our warm dinner may or may not be. So we
started back toward our put in. And the wind was really roaring in
our faces. It made it hard to paddle and hard to talk to each other.
Had work to stay together. For a time a rain storm passed through
and the wind was blowing us backward almost as fast as we could
paddle and the rain was smacking us in the face so hard that it
stung. Mama. At least we were going directly into the incoming waves.
That is by far the easiest way to deal with waves. Just slam through
them. Maybe with a little bit of angle. I was heading pretty much
West (perhaps a little north of West) thinking that we could get up
into the lee of the Nehalem peninsula (where the park is) and out of
the wind. I don't know if that worked for us or not. I think the
little squall we were in passed by before we got close enough to the
trees and the weather ameliorated by itself. At least for now.
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| This is that same "floating" tree |
So after that the slugging up hill
wasn't quite so bad. We spent a little more time enjoying the
scenery. With the tide lower we could see the wide array of ancient
forest debris (most of it logging induced) that had washed up on the
shores. Many a huge log and stump line the shore like so many white
dinosaur bones. My partner kids me because I so enjoy taking pictures
of the dead trees. They have a lot of character.
When we got back to the ramp the cold
wind was blowing right down the ramp. This is when I discovered that
I was a little wet under my dry suit. Here is the deal, you step into
a dry suit through a hole in the chest. You wiggle in your feet, and
then the arms, and then you pull your head in and through the tight
fitting neck gasket. My Suit is nice, but it is lighter than many
others and it has a neoprene neck gasket instead of a tight rubber
gasket. So it is more comfortable but may leak a little. Normally
this is no big deal because even if you tip over, you don't have your
head long underwater. But today I was wearing a wool watch cap to
keep my head warm in the rain. It is true what they say about wool,
it will keep you warm even when it is wet. But it drips down the back
of your neck and some of that water runs through your neoprene seal
and there you have a wet back; cold in the wind.
Good thing I can go warm up in the
yurt.
So we got back to our campsite cold and
tired, but all of us were happy with our little outing. We went to a
new place (perhaps by accident) were few people ever go. We had a
nice time out on the water with friends. We saw some grebes. We had a
little adventure in the rain and waves and wind. A little challenge.
A little excitement. And now we were ready for a nice dinner. We could
either make spaghetti or drive 15 minutes into Manzanita for a steak.
We did the drive.
