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(c) Courtney B. Duncan, 2000, 2005
Part III.
Santa Rosa Island
Chapter 7.
From La Canada to Santa Rosa
Island
I had planned, with growing realism, to take Wednesday and Thursday off during this final preparatory week in order to pack and get enough sleep. Loading the packs and conducting the test hike would be Wednesday. We would camp in the back yard Wednesday night, trying to remember in the process to disable the sprinkler system. Thursday we would get up, take down the camp, re-enable the sprinkler system, and re-pack, making use of our knew knowledge of how heavy things were and what we really did and did not need in the tent. This had been the plan.
Monday and Tuesday went by routinely. It being mid-month, I paid accumulated bills in the evenings. There was still work to do at work. I decided to work half days Wednesday and Thursday, taking both afternoons off and declaring one vacation day for them both. While this was needed at work, it was a mistake, as expected, with regard to the trip preparations.
Katy and Viann started Wednesday with a Girl Scout flag ceremony at 7 a.m. with Congressman Jim Rogan hosting the “Book of Virtues” guy, William Bennett. I went to work. They came home with a dozen mini containers of Tabasco Sauce but had not been fed breakfast. That honor was probably for the Paying Republicans.
I printed out our “Camping Master List” a list that we had developed and used in camping and vacationing in general since 1994. Every trip we would go through the whole list, picking the subset of items that was needed for the particular outing contemplated. This procedure was designed to prevent forgetting anything a second time. The list would also go along on the trip and we would add to it and later edit it as appropriate. Six years of experience came into play. With two backpacks, we weren’t bringing much at all.
The plan for the afternoon was to shop at Sport’s Chalet for a bear-proof food container, snorkeling gear, and a few other odds and ends we still needed, then go to the grocery store for our provisions. We needed all this in place before we could seriously begin packing.
I came home for the day about one. Viannah was at the High School for Band Camp all day. John was home with Viann. I took Katy and went to Sport’s Chalet. First we shopped for snorkeling gear. They had several types of sets in various price ranges. They all looked about the same, function and value-wise. I didn’t know enough to make a better evaluation.
We stood there a long time looking at sets with fins versus sets without. I could still remember my feet hurting in the fins at Family Camp. If we got any fins at all, we’d have to get sets in each of our foot sizes, and we’d have to carry it all in our packs. Finally I decided on one set with a mask and tube and no fins and we got just one. I was thinking that one of us would snorkel while the other watched from nearby. This might keep us out of trouble, and one set was the minimum amount of gear we could have and still try to do anything at all. I explained this to Katy who still protested the need for fins.
We then went upstairs and looked at the books and maps. There wasn’t anything there that looked like a nature guide for anywhere, much less the Channel Islands. There was a book, “How To Shit In The Woods,” describing the lost art of pre-toilet hygiene.
Next we came to the camping pads. I looked at some self-inflating ones, but they were rather expensive and didn’t seem like a good long-term investment. We picked out two Zrest fold-up pads, the 72-inch variety, and added them to our shopping cart.
We then went on over and looked at the camping food. I didn’t want to get anything that required lots of water or cooking, we weren’t taking our camp stove and I was unsure about the water. I picked up some insect repellant and asked for help with the bear-proof food containers. They were out of stock, but a truck was due tomorrow, there might be some then. That would be too late I thought. The helper called the store in Glendora where they put one on hold for me.
Having taken John to karate at Jake’s, Viann was now on the way to Arcadia on business of her own. I had been talking to her on the radio here as we shopped. I checked in, traffic was bad; it had taken nearly an hour to get out there. We could make it ourselves but it would use up a lot of time that we didn’t have to go all the way to Glendora in rush hour, then shop and come back.
We checked out, got in the car, and went to Von’s grocery instead.
We had both the household list and our own camping food list. Tired, we wandered through the store picking up bananas, apples, canned fruit, canned meat, pudding cups, sandwich bread and spreads. We also bought jugs of water to partially replace that which we were taking out of the earthquake supply.
We were standing at a soda pop display when Viann called on the radio. She had gone to the REI store in Arcadia where they had bear-proof food containers in stock for about $75. It would total about $100 with the pack carrying case. She was right there, I told her to buy one and bring it back, wondering if we shouldn’t maybe get two. We finished our own shopping and went home.
Using the den as a staging area, we dumped everything we needed on the floor. I wrote down meals and outlined activity plans so we would know how much food to make and take. Viann got home with the container. It looked smaller than in the pictures. It said it would hold 6 people-days of food. Our trip would be a little more than three days. My fears of not having enough room in which to pack all the food were compounded.
It was 6 p.m. There was still enough light for the test-hike if we left within an hour.
Katy made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and filled sandwich bags with breakfast cereal. We tried arranging everything by meal and putting them in the container in order. There wasn’t going to be room this way and the fruits would crush the sandwiches. Viann suggested packing food sensibly and using the list meal-to-meal to determine what to get out each time. I set them to it, annoyed.
I was wearing a set of blue jeans and taking a set of shorts for sleeping or in case it was hot. We gathered clean socks, underwear and shirts enough to last through Monday. I made up my vitamin box and went to get the necessities out of the bathroom, not forgetting the sunscreen. These were all packed into categorized bags. I was also taking two books, the trip journal, some island literature, and of course the hand-held radio with extra batteries, the GPS receiver, flashlights, and the routine stuff in the daypack (glasses, reading glasses, repeater directory, bus schedules, a little spare money, and so forth).
We emptied out the old red daypack that Viannah had taken through the Grand Canyon. Katy would use this. With all of her clothes and her bunny, it was rather full but not heavy. There was a discussion about which sleeping bag Katy would use. Viann’s old one was finally brought out. Using bungee, I attached it and her Zrest pad to Katy’s small pack. This was ungainly.
We also had a piece of luggage for clothes we would either wear on the first day or things that would only go to the hotel but not with us on the trip. We put appropriate items in this and discussed our shoes. I wanted Katy to wear the hiking boots that we’d bought for Viannah to cross the Grand Canyon and that Katy had been wearing on many training hikes. She didn’t want to wear them, it wasn’t clear whether it was because they didn’t fit anymore, which was entirely possible, or because she didn’t want to do much hiking, which was also entirely possible, or both.
“But how will you carry them if you don’t wear them on the boat?” I asked.
“I’m not taking them,” she replied.
“What are you going to hike in?”
“My tennies.” She had these on already.
“OK, well, be sure and take your water socks for campground use and swimming.”
I found both of our pairs and we packed them in my pack close to the snorkeling stuff.
This, I thought, was my least favorite part of the trip, trying to get everything together and packed. We would live with decisions we made now for the entire adventure, four days in this case and it looked like a lot of stuff sitting around on the floor that we had to stuff into packs.
“You have way too much food,” Viann warned. “You can’t each eat a whole can of Spam at one meal.”
She was probably right. In addition, packing way too much food had been a “lesson learned” from the Grand Canyon trip. “Well, do whatever you think is right and I’ll look at it.” This was nobody’s favorite part; tempers were getting short.
We ended up with the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, apples, and some canned foods and trail bars in the bear-proof container. It was full to the top. We closed and locked it. “I guess we won’t open that again until we’re there.”
“Probably not,” Viann affirmed.
I tore off three-dozen paper towels, folded them and put them in three sandwich bags. “Plates.” There was also a nearly used-up roll of toilet paper. I put it in it’s own bag. “Tissue.”
I re-rolled then struggled to get my own big sleeping bag attached to my backpack. We had to unpack the dual tent and separate out the parts for the small tent, being careful to get the tent itself, the fly, the right set of polls and the stakes. There was a big bag of stakes, partly from the larger tent, partly accumulated from prior campgrounds. I left that behind. We rolled up the smaller tent by itself and attached it to the side of my backpack opposite my pad.
I tied one of the two canteens to the top of my pack but didn’t fill either one.
It was 10 p.m. We were exhausted. Even I was worried about being considered homeless out backpacking around the neighborhood at this hour of the night.
“Where are we going on the test hike?” Katy asked for the fourth time.
“Around the block.”
”But we don’t live on a block.”
“Well, around the block we have, up to the bus stop, past the YMCA, past JoAnn’s back down like you come home from the bus. That’s about the same distance as from the boat landing to the campground.”
“Oh, I thought you meant going just around the neighborhood here.”
“No, that’s not far enough.”
“Why don’t you get up early and do it in the morning,” Viann suggested, “You can get up with me when I get ready to go to work.” She was always wanting people to do this, get up early.
“Yes, we’ll have to do that. Let’s leave all this here and go to bed.”
We left everything there and went to bed.
The Actual Test Hike
Of the two preparatory events, the Test Hike and the Test Campout, the Test Hike was more important. We knew how to camp out and we knew pretty much what we did and didn’t need with us for that, but we had much less experience backpacking, that is, carrying everything for the campout in a single load on our backs for any distance.
We did not get up early Thursday morning, and when we did get up, around 7:30, it was already getting warm, as it sometimes does in southern California in August and September. Viann had gone to work at 6:30 a.m.
We were loaded by 8:15 and ready to walk out the door. I had on Scott Owens' backpack (still on loan from the Grand Canyon trip with Viannah) and had a water jug in each hand. Katy had both smaller backpacks, the one Viannah had used, containing her clothes, our general daypack, and one jug of water. We each also had a canteen attached to our luggage, but in a small act of mercy, or a little lack of integrity, or a little laziness, I had not filled them with water. Katy’s load was ungainly. The backpack with the bedroll and pad was on her back, but the three things flopped around, shifting the weight. The other backpack was rather heavy and was in her hand. I thought we might trade some of this around. I had planned to take four water jugs, then later, three, switching the “empty hand” around while walking, but there was no “empty hand” in this arrangement.
We walked out the door and down the hill. Katy was still worried about being thought of as homeless. “People will stare at us,” she said.
“Just stare back at them as if it looked strange for them to be sitting in that car on this street. That will usually stop them.” Later on, up the hill as we walked along Foothill, I tried this the few times that I noticed anybody staring. It worked fine.
These loads were heavy. We bottomed out and started up the hill on La Granada. I was already sweating. Salt water was already getting into my eyes. This was going to be harder than I thought. We passed under the beginning of the 2 Freeway and passed the four new houses, turning further uphill into the older neighborhood. Katy wanted to rest. We stopped by some trashcans and set down the water for a minute. It was trash day in the neighborhood.
“We’ll take a longer rest on the bench at the bus stop when we get there.” This was about two more blocks, most of it uphill.
“What if the bus stops?” Katy asked.
“We won’t get on. They wouldn’t let us on with all this stuff anyway.”
We picked up the water and continued. My hands and forearms were hurting. The little jug handles would only comfortably take three fingers, but I kept alternating between four getting pinched or various combinations of three. None of this reduced the twenty pound weight of each jug.
We reached Foothill and turned onto the real sidewalk. The bus stop was only half a block further and had a little shade from a tree. We stopped there and took off our packs.
“Ugh,” we uttered jointly.
The bus didn’t come while we were there, but a policeman stopped at the light. I didn’t look to see if he saw us. The next time I looked he was gone.
After five minutes, we got up and re-loaded. I remembered how, throughout the Grand Canyon and all the training hikes, I would get totally up and ready before Viannah would even stand up. It seemed like towards the end I was catching on to this and using different techniques. I helped Katy get loaded first then hitched up myself with help from the bench. We continued to the stoplight.
“How are your feet?” I asked. On a 1-1/2 mile hike one shouldn’t have trouble with feet unless there was something really wrong with the shoes.
“Fine.”
That was good.
We came to the bus stop near the YMCA and stopped for a rest in place. A high-school-age looking girl was sitting there looking a little concerned. Katy thought she looked frightened and started talking to her about what we were doing. She didn’t know how to respond. A bus stopped, she got on.
We went on through the road cut and to the bus stop in front of JoAnn’s. Here we unloaded and stopped for ten minutes. I was dripping and tried to dry my face with my shirt, making a messy smudge on it in the process. This was going to be about twice as hard as I had thought. On the other hand, it looked like we would be able to make it.
We reshuffled the water jugs and daypack for the rest of the hike. I took the daypack and one jug and Katy took the rest. She dropped one jug picking it up and it leaked a little. We would want to mark it and use it first, perhaps, or swap it for another at home before leaving.
In another twenty minutes we were walking up the hill back at home. My arms were screaming from carrying the water and I couldn’t get the daypack oriented right to make it easy to bear. They were meant as backpacks, not hand packs.
John was up watching TV when we walked in the house. It was 9:45; it had taken an hour and a half to walk around the block. Unencumbered, it might have been half that, especially with an eager dog pulling you along.
We dumped our stuff back in the staging area. “Ugh.”
“I think you need a real backpack, I’ll call Sport’s Chalet and see if they have any of their rentals available and we’ll put all the stuff you’re carrying in that. What we’re doing now is too cumbersome.”
“OK.”
Change of Pack Configuration
I went right to work, arriving rather late, particularly for a “half day.” It was busy. We were doing things solid through one p.m. when I got up and left. I did find a couple of minutes to call Sport’s Chalet rentals locally and find that they had “a few” external frame backpacks left to rent.
Viannah was at band day camp again and Viann was still at work. I found John and Katy playing Nintendo. “We’ll go out to lunch but first we have to go get Katy a backpack.” After more ‘encouragement,’ we were all in the van. We drove down to Sport’s Chalet rentals, a converted gas station right at the corner of Foothill and Highway 2 East (North) up into the mountains. In addition to the staff, some other guys were in the store, jawing about their various summer jobs at camps and such and their Halloween party they were planning. Still, I was able to get somebody’s attention long enough to check the backpacks.
“All the external frame backpacks we have are reserved today,” one of them said, coming back out.
“How about internal?”
He went back in. I noticed all the snow skis in storage. “This would be a good time to rent snow skis wouldn’t it,” I pointed this out to Katy.
She looked shocked. “Yeah dad,” she replied, but the look on her face said, “How are we going to get to the North Pole to use them?”
The guy came back with a dark green Jansport, #01-3126-01, which was about the size and form factor of Scott’s pack. It was the only one available.
We had Katy put it on and adjusted it to her, working around her long hair. Empty, it felt like nothing at all, she thought. She turned around; more adjustments were made. It looked fine; we would take it.
“Do you want it right now or want to reserve it?”
“We want it right now.”
I presented my Master Card for the $23.00, the rental based on a Tuesday return. It didn’t go through. They had to run it manually.
“Sometimes it doesn’t have money in it,” I joked.
The guy smiled.
This took more time away from the party discussion. The guy’s language was foul at times. I was eager to get out. We browsed around the brochures but didn’t see anything we didn’t already know about. Finally the charge was completed and we were on the way to lunch.
They wanted pizza. We went to Round Table in La Crescenta near Ralph’s. It was fairly empty except for a few kids here and there, home alone for the day, off at the pizza place. Katy and John played a game for a quarter each and were good not to ask for more. The pizza was Pepperoni, Pineapples, and Red Onions. The possible toppings were listed in alphabetical order on the menu on the wall. These three were on the same line together and appealed to Katy for their appearance and sound. John had to scrape all the pineapple and red onions off of his pieces.
While we ate it occurred to me that we were going to eat out tonight again and this was a little luxurious. On the other hand, we were about to eat peanut butter and jelly for four days straight.
Back home, Katy easily moved everything she was to carry over to the new pack, and had room left over to put both canteens inside rather than dangling them outside. Something else Island Packers recommended against was having stuff dangling from your pack. We would learn, handling everybody else’s gear while unloading the boat, that just leaving small things like that separate was fine, as long as you were willing to risk losing or forgetting about it.
We got out a marker bought for the occasion and Katy started labeling everything, “Duncan,” most times on duct tape stuck to the outside, but sometimes directly to the item, like our new sleeping pads. This, too, was to prevent confusion with all the gear that would be on the boat. My radio was hanging on the outside of the pack. It got a label. So did one of the cats.
We decided to carry only three water jugs. It might not be enough but we would just have to make do.
Viann arrived home nearly on time, around four. We were supposed to leave right then but weren’t through packing or dealing with food yet. The meat sandwiches with cheese and lettuce still hadn’t been made, for instance. She started working on that, using lettuce from our own garden, while I filled the canteens with our “reverse osmosis” water. We looked at different Igloos and decided that the little lunch-box sized one would be just right for tomorrow’s lunch and dinner, given a little ice. Anticipating this, Viann had prepared a lot more ice than we needed for the little lunchbox.
She and John threw some overnight things in the motel bag. John brought his little car ferry and Titanic model to play with in the pool. I looked for the Titanic book briefly but couldn’t figure out when we would read it, so gave up.
We were ready to move our gear to the van. “We ought to be able to do this in one trip,” I remarked.
Katy laughed.
We did make it in one trip but then, as with every ride in the car, had to run back in for other things, worrying about letting the cat out each time the door opened.
At 5:25 p.m., we were ready to drive away. It was 31 C. (88 F)
The route to Oxnard was 210 west to 118 west, over the pass through Chatsworth and Simi Valley, then turn with the road into 23 south which met the 101 near Westlake Village, then going the other way, west again, over another pass and past the strawberry fields into Oxnard. Even though it was rush hour, there was only one patch of slow traffic, right after we merged onto the 101, and it wasn’t very slow as traffic jams go. At 6:35 p.m. we were checking into the La Quinta, which was just three miles from the port.
The front desk was busy. A man who might have been the manager came out to help us. He was in a terse mood. We had a reservation for the one night and, in response to their Continental Breakfast, we wanted to know where the nearest Denny’s was since we were planning to eat at 5 a.m., not between 6 and 10.
“About four miles up the freeway,” he gave directions.
We asked for a 4:30 wakeup call. Tomorrow was going to be a long day.
Our room was right next to the pool, which was very popular. The TV had Nintendo games on it that were even more popular. We gave everybody a chance to play one thing; Katy’s one thing took more than half an hour, and then dragged them off to the van to go to dinner.
This was a test drive to Denny’s. We were going to find it, and see how to get there, then see how to get from there to the dock where we were supposed to be at 6:15 in the morning.
The freeway and the shoreline were coming close together at this point, and there was construction. We had some trouble finding Denny’s and some more getting to it. Finally, just as it was getting dark at a quarter to eight, we went in.
Business was slow and we got lots of attention from our waiter. Katy spilled her lemonade and they made a big fuss about moving us to a different table. We checked that they were open all night; they would probably be the only place open at 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning.
Katy pointed out a scratch on my right elbow that I had forgotten about. “That’s the only place on your body you can’t see, isn’t it?” she asked.
Back in the van, we made our way through the construction and in the dark to Spinnaker Ave., the entrance to the port. By now we had been here enough to know our way around and where we were going. We drove out to the Park Service facility with Island Packers next door. Everything was closed for the night, though there were people in the parking lot doing something.
Viann’s head cold was getting worse, she wanted to get back to the room and go to bed. She also wanted an Actifed, thinking that it would help with her runny nose. We went up to a convenience store back down the harbor. It appeared to be the only establishment open. A pack of 12 Actifed cost $5.78. Viann was amazed, but it seemed about right to me, about twice what you would pay at a reasonable discount drug store.
We got back to the hotel at a quarter past nine and the kids headed straight for the pool with their towels and boats. For Katy and I, this meant unloading some of our backpacks to find our swimwear.
Some other kids were in the pool; they were speaking Spanish to their mother out in a chair. Two women and a man were in the Jacuzzi talking some sort of business. Only one of the three of them had much hair. Two jovial fellows came and sat smoking at a corner table. Jovial that is until they started recreational swearing.
“This sure isn’t Family Camp,” I thought to myself. “I’ve got to swear off swearing myself.”
Viann came out for a few minutes to see the Titanic sink then went in to go to bed. John played first with the ferryboat (complete with cars and trucks) that we’d bought in Avalon. He was very careful with the Titanic model. Katy, as usual, wouldn’t let him play by himself and wouldn’t let him make any decision how to use his own toys without second-guessing and criticizing. She was in his face non-stop for fifteen or twenty minutes. Finally it started getting physical. In the water, this could be dangerous. Katy would be insulted and instantly defensive to be corrected about it. I gave her a five-minute time-out, the first time I’d given her a time-out in years. She sulked but complied, a pretty big kid to be getting out of the pool for a time-out. After 2-3 minutes, I let her get back in. Things were better.
Interest in the boats had diminished. I took the Titanic down to the five-foot water and tried it out. It did in fact sail pretty well, although, to scale, the waves here in the pool were about 200 feet. It bobbed around some, as a big ocean liner in such a hurricane would. Then I flipped the float/sink switch and, sure enough, just like the book said it would, it took on water from the bow, broke up, and sank in just the same way that the real Titanic had. The bow was nearly to the bottom while the stern upended, completely vertical, and went under itself. This may have been the first time the model had been allowed to sink on its own, given all the fights before.
I put it away at our table. Viann had said, “It was a terrible tragedy.”
The security guard came by. It was ten p.m. The pool was closed. Katy and John ran in to the Nintendo. Viann was in bed but not quite asleep. I had to forcefully turn the thing off so everyone could get to bed. Katy and I both needed to bathe and wash our hair, for perhaps the last time until next Tuesday. Viann told John that they would get up early to see us off, then would come back to the hotel and sleep some more, not leaving early. He could play more Nintendo then. I would not miss Nintendo on Santa Rosa.
Bathed and ready to go, I put our suits on the air conditioner to dry more before packing them. We would leave the final re-close-out until tomorrow morning. We sat the camping alarm clock and went to bed, Katy and Viann in the bed by the window, John and I in the other one. Viann gave me a dry kiss, trying not to give me her cold. It was probably too late, I feared. Maybe Katy wouldn’t get it. There was more hope for that.
I had suffered through the day with the usual pre-trip nerves and this continued through the night.
The phone was ringing. Nobody answered it. The alarm started sounding. I rolled over and got up. The phone rang again. It was the automatic wakeup call.
It was 4:35, we got on our trip clothes and I started trying to get my sleeping bag back on the backpack. This led to the first “short temper” incident of the day. Maybe I’d swear off swearing after we got back.
Shortly after five, we were all ready to go. We loaded all our gear in the car, noting that one of the water jugs (which had been left in the car) had a small puddle around it. I marked this one with an “X” so we would use it first and turned it upside down for the car trip.
We drove to Denny’s with less confusion than before. It was 5:15; we had 45 minutes. There was only one waitress; she was in a tizzy. We ordered quickly. The breakfast she brought us was too much. Another waitress arrived, things started calming down.
It was way too much and I ate too much of mine before getting a box for the rest. At six, more or less arbitrarily, we got up, paid, and drove to the dock, arriving right on time at 6:15. People were already there moving gear around. We went in and paid for our trip, $160. I bought a Dr. Pepper for me and a green Fruitopia for Katy. We looked at the maps and books but decided there wasn’t anything there that was close enough to what we needed that it was worth buying. Ordinarily in a situation like this I would buy a big book about everything intending to read it after the adventure was over, but the adventure was never over and things were never really calm enough to read those big books. And, afterwards, priorities always changed anyway so that book would never get to the "top of the stack" either. Well, hardly ever.
Another pair of people was paying. There was supposed to be six of them, but four had bailed at the last moment. “We should charge in advance, then this wouldn’t happen,” the lady behind the counter told the man working with her, but it didn’t look like there was any danger of canceling the trip due to a shortage of customers.
“Rats!” I said.
“What?” asked Viann.
“I think I left my camping alarm clock in the room
on the
nightstand. Make sure and get it when
you leave. It would be too hard to
check our packs now.”
”OK, I’ll get it if it’s there. Don’t
worry.”
I wasn’t worried, we wouldn’t need an alarm clock on the island; we would get up and go to bed with the sun. Probably wouldn’t have any choice. Still, it irritated me to have something where I wasn’t sure where it was, not where it was supposed to be, and to have that little thing on my list to either note lost or note found sometime days from now when we unpacked. And the irritation was an outlet for my nerves.
The trip was supposed to be 3-1/2 hours. “A three and a half hour cruise,” I sang to John in a parody of the “Gilligan’s Island” theme song. This kept him humming for the rest of the time we were there. I told Viann to buy the official Channel Islands National Island picture book to take home, which she did after we were gone.
Our boat for the day, the Jeffrey Arvid, was off being fueled. Shortly it came back and loading operations commenced. Half a dozen kayaks went below and seemingly endless gear from a two or three dozen passengers. We missed the bucket brigade and later had to take our packs and jugs down by ourselves. “We should be able to do this in one trip, again,” I thought.
We walked over to the Park Headquarters and looked through the closed gate at the model of the islands. Our location, relative to the model, was right in the middle of a big post. I stood John in front of the post and pointed out where we were going and how we would get there. Santa Rosa was far enough back that it was hard to see.
Finally it was time to get aboard. I hurriedly took my Merazine pill. Viann gave her traditional parting, “Be careful. Take care of my little girl.” This goodbye kiss was a little wetter. I put on the daypack and we went down the dock and climbed on board. Tim, “the deckhand and generally our best friend for the day,” as he put it, gave the lecture about how to stay on the boat, ("one hand for the boat"), how to use the bio-sensitive potties, how to feed the fish if necessary (i.e. “hurl”) and how not to skid across the "anti-skid" deck surface. Those floats up there (at the highest point on the boat) would activate (i.e., float off) when the boat got “to that level” in an emergency. There were exits all around; he pointed at all the railings. And, don’t sit on the railings, i.e., don’t do anything your mother wouldn’t let you do. A common maritime theme, mother’s discipline. He also introduced the rest of the crew, the skipper, a couple of other hands, a co-skipper who would be the skiff operator on San Miguel, and a Park Service volunteer, a twenty-something short blond who was the last one to step on board.
We waved goodbye to the shore; I took a picture. The boat cast off and we pulled away. It was 7:40.
Island Packers was near the entrance to the harbor. We were soon passing the water breaks. Viann and John were out on the rocks waving. We waved back. I should have taken another picture, but they wouldn’t have been visible in it, not from this camera. Soon they were out of sight in the sunrise behind us. The boat stopped and circled the buoy at the entrance to the harbor; we got our first wildlife lesson looking at the sea lions, including one large bull, reclining on the buoy.
The young skipper said, “Tighten your hat bands, as we throttle up and go to sea.”
Soon we were in fog and couldn’t see more than a few miles in any direction. Land behind us or on either side was out of sight. We settled in for a long ride. I was feeling fine; most of the uneasiness about the trip so far was gone for the moment.
“How are you doing?” I asked Katy.
”Fine.” She was getting ready to lie
down.
After a while, Andrea Moe, our interpretative ranger (whose uniform sported the prominent nametag “Volunteer”) came on the intercom to announce the “Anacapa Air Force,” a squadron of maybe a dozen large birds flying north across our bow. We stirred and looked, having little else to do, but we’d seen this before. The Anacapa Air Force was a fairly common sighting in these waters.
The water was very calm, in some parts nearly glassy.
The motion of the boat was mild.
I stared at the sea out to the north, trying to make out
features or
even scale for hundreds of yards, maybe miles.
It was nearly like watching the wind blow the waves of grain on
the
plains in the panhandle of Texas. I
pointed this out to Katy. There were
spots that were calmer than others, little flat footprints. I explained how different wind speeds made
different wave sizes and how large waves could travel very far across
the
ocean, their losses being so small.
Occasionally we would pass a loose kelp bed floating far at sea. About three gulls ranged overhead but,
picking up nothing from us, soon abandoned our boat.
I could barely see the outline of West Anacapa off to the south and then it was gone in the light fog. Once I saw the mainland briefly, then it too was gone in the haze.
At one point, the skipper and a helper came out and shooed people off of one of the benches. Then he opened it up, it was a door to the engine room. He put on ear protection and went down for a few minutes, then came back up without comment. We continued.
The ranger came on again as the boat slowed. There was a pod of dolphins coming over to play around the boat. Everybody rushed up to the bow. Dozens of dolphins would jump along beside us, then dart under the bow of the boat and come up on the other side. A few more rode the waves of the wake. I could see at least one family with a little dolphin in it, going along with the rest. I took some pictures of this, some of them successful.
We went on for another hour, occasionally sipping our drinks or studying the ever-same, ever-changing ocean off in a different direction for a while. I got the GPS out and found where we were. It was Santa Cruz off to the south now. We were around half way.
The boat slowed again, Andrea came on the loudspeaker, much more excited this time. Maybe it would be a whale!
A pod of dolphins was charging across our bow just now. I looked out to the port side and several hundred forms were racing to get in front of us. We slowed to what must have been “dolphin speed” and hundreds more appeared. Some were in front; some were out on either side. We looked back along the wake. Every little wave had dozens of dolphins playing in it, in both directions as far back as we could see! I estimated there must be at least a thousand. Hadn’t she said before that there was something like 20,000 dolphins who lived in the channel? . People had video cameras. This was the only time I had ever really wanted a video camera.
After a few minutes of this, the boat returned to full cruise speed, about 25 km/hour according to GPS, maybe 13-14 knots. The dolphin’s drifted off slowly to the stern.
West Santa Cruz seemed to consist of rocky, prominent cliffs. Further west was a flat, plateau-like peninsula with, maybe, some beaches. We were two or three miles off to the north of East Point. These features, in fact, this grandeur sure didn’t show up on the navigation maps.
We turned a bit to the left. We must be rounding the point and headed into the pier at Santa Rosa. Yes! I could see Santa Rosa ahead, and to both sides of ahead. We were headed for the middle of the crescent-shaped Becher’s Bay. I pointed this out to Katy.
“That’s nice,” she said, and lay back down.
I tried taking a picture but it probably wouldn’t show much. I would have to have some self-restraint with the not-very-likely pictures.
The boat plowed steadily ahead. These were long distances at these slow speeds. The water was not as smooth here in the Santa Cruz Channel. The swells were three or four feet and there was some chop. Nonetheless, the island and the features of the crescent slowly got nearer and clearer. There was no rush to do anything, even when we were at the pier there would be so much to unload that we would have plenty of time to get our things together and check.
Most of the passengers seemed to be bound for San Miguel. Only maybe a dozen of us were stopping at Santa Rosa. Katy was concerned about this, but I had read about San Miguel, and I was concerned for those other passengers. San Miguel was a beach landing and the wind blew there, unprotected, all the time. Santa Rosa, by contrast, had running water, a protected campground and even electricity for some.
We were between islands; the destination was drawing closer. I could feel the excitement of getting close to the target. This was like going to Mars! Imagine some routine travelers to Mars in the future. After days or weeks of travel, the destination would start to come into more detailed view, more than just a red dot. It would have recognizable features and would get larger and larger as the craft approached. I was seeing Mars up there, though it took a special point of view to see it. Sure, other people had been going there or living there, for hundreds or thousands of years, but so what, not many of them. There was such a premium on being “first” or a pioneer and then there was such a “done that already” stigma to every frontier that was opened, it was hard to see the uniqueness of an abandoned place being as valuable as that of yet-to-be-conquered place. Nobody had yet been to Mars, and when it became possible to go it would cost vast amounts of money. Nearly nobody ever went to Santa Rosa and yet a middle class family could afford to go and explore … whatever was there.
The crescent more than enfolded us now. The angle around from, let’s see, what was it, Skunk Point to the southeast, to Carrington Point on the northwest, was more than 180 degrees.
Mars was getting closer. I could make out some structures on the beach and the pier. Yes, that feature was probably the pier.
There was a sailboat anchored to the north of the pier. We pulled in, slowing. The pier turned at the end to the left (as we viewed it). We were coming around to back up to the left-facing end. The crew was taking down the railing in the back. We were going to back up to a set of a dozen of what looked like four-inch galvanized pipes. Kind of rickety compared to other piers I had seen. The skipper swung us around, and let the swell drift us in.
Thump! People stumbled a bit. We had arrived. The Jeffrey Arvid had landed.
“Everybody going to Santa Rosa, this is it!” the skipper announced from the controls on top of the bridge. He stood there adjusting the motors to keep us flat back to the pier. We washed up and down while it stood nearly still, groaning.
Katy and I climbed the ladder to the top. The brigade was forming below to hand the gear up from the hold to the ladder. I should have stayed down and helped with that, but it looked like there were enough still on deck for that part of the job. Piece after piece came out of the doorway marked “no passengers, employees only” that went below. Item after item made it’s way across to and up the ladder. Katy and I helped on the top, piling things up as they arrived. Our two pieces came along; they seemed the two heaviest of the lot. Some of the crew below had noted this too and made faces. We leaned them against each other to the side. Nearly at the end, our water was handed up.
About 20 people remained on the boat, that we could see, and all of the kayaks. They looked around to see if there was anything else. We looked around to see if anything was missing. Everyone was checking their gear to see that it was all there. Andrea climbed up. She had gear too, a food box and a water jug. I guessed she must be staying on Santa Rosa for the weekend too and she seemed to be in charge, after a fashion.
She and the skipper exchanged words. We were disembarked. We were here. This was it!