Crash
landing
the F2 at
Arch Cape
"Houston, we've had a problem here."
The important thing to
point out here is that things didn't feel right from the
beginning. It was a beautiful morning but for a variety of
reasons Leann and I were having a hard time getting our act together to
get on the water. It was 11am by the time I actually had
the fishing poles strapped onto the deck of the double and Leann even
asked, "Are you feeling this?" truthfully, I wasn't,
not at all, but I wanted to go fishing and I assummed that as soon as
we got onto the ocean, put up the sail and got the lines down,
the weird feelings would dissappear and we could relax and drink a beer
as we drifted across the swells in the time honored tradition of
stoically waiting for bites.
The little things kept adding
up: I needed to get different hooks, then I lost those
hooks ten minutes later, we needed coffee, we were hungry,
we were crabby and for no apparrant reason suffering a general mood of
unpleasantness. An hour later our friend Mark dropped us
and boat at Cannon beach where we went through the ritual motions of
checking the gear, loading the boat, and finally punching out through
the surf. The swell was running about 6 feet at 9 seconds,
which is a pretty meaty swell to be forcing a double through, but
honestly, I've been doing this a long time and I've developed a talent
for reading the water and sneaking through the rips.
Nonetheless, punching out was a strong effort and right on the edge of
what is generally possible for a tandem kayak.
We paddled two miles offshore
and I set the lines while Leann paddled slowly to maintain a steady
pull. Two half-poles trailed divers and herring that spun in slow
lazy loops as I let out sixty feet or so of fifty-pound test braided
line from each reel. A kayak has always seemed to me like a
smart way to fish. You unload the boat, zip on a drysuit, and
paddle straight toward where the fish are, which is certainly less
circuitous than loading a trailer, driving your skiff to a boat ramp,
motoring across a bay, crossing a bar, and then zoomming ten miles back
to where the fish are. The kayak does require a bit
of fitness, but for those willing to make the effort, it's a very
efficient route to fish on the table. That said, I
deplore extended physical efforts and only maintain my current fitness
level as a means to an end, that is to say, I tolerate the
torture of running, biking, and paddling, for the access to beautiful
places.
The wind that day had been
forecast at 10-15 knots, gusting to 25 out of the northwest,
meaning that our little blue sail should have pulled us and the
significant drag of our divers, smartly along somewhere between 2 and
2.5 knots, perfect trolling speed. You can
imagine my dismay when we arrived well offshore at 1:30 PM with nary a
breath of wind across the water. So began our slow trudge
southward, dipping wood blades into the mollasses of the ocean
and pulling it past beneath a gray overcast sky. Leann layed back
and napped and I resigned myself the inevitability of my
predicament. Two hours later I was becoming quite
sour. "What the f***?" I complained to noone in
particular, "It's freaking JULY, I don't care if there is a
southern air mass moving onshore, it's freakin' 3:30,
there is sun behind those mountains, the air there has to be
heating up and rising, and the air out here is definately twenty
degrees cooler, so where is my onshore breeze?!" I
continued, "Sure, sometimes the wind dies off on the north end of
a headland, but Jesus, we're almost to Cape Falcon, I can see the
sun dammit, where is the wind?" Leann listened
patiently as only someone who literally has no other choice can,
as I vented my frustrations at the lack of salmon, the developers, the
polluters, the loggers, the commercial fishers, and ultimately at
nature itself. It was now 4:30 and we had
traveled all of six miles with eight miles left to go and no sign of
fish or wind. Dry land to our left was starting to
look mighty appealing. I made the call.
"We're done, let's set her
down at Arch Cape, maybe we can pull in a few lings off castle
rock." After ten minutes of hard paddling, we rose
and fell in significant steep waves just off the face of the rock, as I
tried futilely to hook into a ling cod with the only tackle I had
available, a diver and a herring. Needless to say this rig
tangled into a hopeless snarl before it was halfway down to the
bottom. Judging the endeavor pointless we paddled
safely away from the rock and prepped the boat for a surf landing,
everything strapped down hard, gear check, and a breifing
on tactics:
"So, here's the situation, the
swell is starting to pulse a little harder than the forecast, and Arch
Cape has nasty rips, making this less than an optimal situation.
Or choices are to paddle 4 miles to short sands beach, to a good
landing but an evil carry up to the highway, or 8 miles to
Manzanita to a landing that might not be much better than
this. We're going to try to come in on the back of a set
and cross the impact zone before the next set hits, catch a smaller
wave on the inside and brace hard into
the foam and ride it out. Worst case scenario here is we
end up getting nailed by a set wave just as it flat-walls and we get
pounded. That's going to be a long, scary, unpleasant swim,
and we might lose the boat, but it's not likely to be life
threatening. We'd have to be pretty unlucky for that
to happen, but it could happen."
Leann didn't neccesarily sign
off on the plan, rather she trusted me, and liked the idea of dry land
as much as I did at this point. I trusted my judgement of the
situation, but as we got closer and I got a visual on the surf zone, I
got a bad feeling. I know these rips, I know the beach, and
I know my skills, but nonetheless, it just didn't feel
right. So I asked myself the important question: could we
die here? Let's see, we're both is full drysuits with hoods
and heavy insulation underneath, water temps are in the low 50's
today, Leann and I are both strong swimmers, and most
importantly she is the type of person who doesn't panic in stressful
situations. Demise was highly unlikely. So we went
for it.
We waited for a big set to
pass and then paddled hard straight down the center of the main rip,
avoiding the violence of eight foot waves firing off on the sand bars
on either side of us. It's a long surf break though, with
both rips pulling out to sea and sideways rips between the inside and
outside breaks, that themselves feed into the rips that pull out.
Leann said "I'm nervous." to which I accidentally replied "I'm
nervous too." Which is about the least confidence inspiring
response I can imagine. I glanced back and saw the next set
loading up on the horizon, it was definately going to break
through the rip. The first set wave is always smaller
so as it stacked up behind us we paddled as hard as we could to ride it
in and escape from the the waves behind it. For a moment
the boat caught and started to slide, and then, the wave mushed out and
it slipped beneath us, leaving us in the worst possible spot:
over a sand bar with a set wave stacking up behind us. I
saw the eleven foot set wave go flat and start to feather. It
lifted our stern and as we rode up the face I said calmly,
matter-of-factly:
"We are going to get pounded
by this wave."
Leann asked, "What should I
do?"
I replied "Just try to
relax."
The kayak stood vertical and
we were thrown end for end in an avalanche of white.
I should have tried to roll,
but I knew given our poor success in practice sessions that it was
pretty unlikely, and I also knew we were sitting in the impact
zone about 4 seconds away from the next big wave, so while Leann
held in waiting for me to try to roll, I swam out of the boat as the
next wave hammered her. She popped out on the back side of
the wave and swam. "Get away from the boat!" I
yelled. You don't want to be anywhere near a flooded kayak in
breaking waves. Using our paddles, we both started swimming
as hard as we could toward shore. We were fighting the rip
but swimming parallel in this case would probably have caused us to be
swept around the corner and unpleasantly close to a few offshore
rocks. It would work as a plan B, but I was
still strongly intent on hitting the sand at Arch Cape. The
rip was slowly pushing us sideways into a line of breakers, so all we
needed to do was hold position until we drifted into the breaking
waves. At one point I got ahead of Leann so I swam
back out to her yelling "Paddle harder!" and she yelled back,
"I'm paddling as hard as I can!" For about
seven minutes we did nothing more than hold position about 70 yards
offshore, it was a lot of work and I was glad for every mile I
forced myself to run in the last year. The water was
COLD and I was barely maintaining body temperature in my Kokatat
drysuit. Leann wasn't scared, but I was. I have a
rock solid roll in a single kayak and I'm not used to being out of my
boat in the surf. Circumstances indicated that we'd be
fine, but emotionally I was pretty rattled by the feeling of
helplessness. I was very happy when we drifted sideways into the
breakers and I felt that first strong shove of foamy whitewater
tumbling me toward shore. Leann followed behind me, and while we
were still getting pulled back, each wave that we caught pulled us into
more breakers which eventually pushed us into shore. The
whole process had taken about fifteen minutes. Fifteen
minutes is a long time to swim as hard as you can. The boat
was nowhere to be seen, but I was fine with that.
Standing in waist deep water I
saw the crowd gathering on the beach and people running out toward us
in the water.
'Uh oh.' I
thought, and then I heard the sirens.
A wet suited man carrying a
long red board flashed past us while we jumped up and down waving our
paddles. "Hey, we're OK!" we yelled. We caught
his eye just as he was diving into the water, and he
stopped. I imagine it's got to suck to have that much
adrenaline and nothing to do with it. In a way I felt bad
that we were ok. I used to work EMS and regardless of what
any of those guys will tell you, they WANT to rescue
somebody. Before we could escape from the beach we
were waylayed by the Fire Rescue guys and in a few moment of mutual
irritability, forced to give them our details. I hate
giving my info. to these guys because it inevitably shows up in the
paper without context and makes me look like a dufus.
Honestly, you don't have to tell them anything, but I didn't feel like
pressing the point.
A nice lady offered us a ride
back to Manzanita in her super-cool pimped-out 1980's camper van,
which we graciously accepted. Back at the truck, we
stripped off our gear but left on our drysuits.
"Well," I said sheepishly "...lets go find the
boat." We drove back to Falcon Cove, just south
and around the rocky corner from Arch Cape, and wound our way
down on residential streets to the north end of the cove.
We ultimately ended up parking in some ladies driveway that bordered on
the beach and she very reluctantly agreed to let us park next to her
precious Lexus SUV, while we walked 4 feet across her private property
to get to the beach to look for our boat. Beach may
be a bit of a misnomer though, the 'beach' at Falcon Cove
consists of a fifteen foot high slope of softball sized round rocks
that roll endlessly up and down in the surf. We
stumbled and slid our way north for a quarter mile before we found the
boat, unceremoniously dumped onto the rocks, the chocolate
brown hull contrasting nicely with the steel grey
slope. With no apparant damage, I flipped it over and
found the rudder, and fishing poles, and pretty much everything on deck
mangled. Everything external had taken a pounding that bespoke a
boat full of water grinding up and down the rocks for about fifteen
minutes. Ever since I saw my first skinboat
take this sort of abuse, I've had implicit faith in skin-on-frame
construction, but I must say, that even I was surprised that the boat
suffered no skin damage, and no frame damage. None. A
glass boat would have been shredded.
We shouldered the twenty foot
boat and carried it back, and I must say here again, the lightweight of
a skinboat was a blessing. We strapped it onto the car
while I talked to the same lady about the possible Cape Falcon Marine
Reserve. Like so many people, she didn't really understand
the reserve, and didn't WANT to understand it. Rather
she echoed the sad, colloquial mistrust of conservation that has
infected the American conciousness in the last century.
Perhaps it has always been this way but to me it seems like we have
become a nation of empty heads, content to replace meaningful
dialogue with stupid catch phrases that serve as a weak substitute
for incisive thought. I left feeling sad and
dissapointed. A feeling that was quickly supplanted by the
sheer bliss of a tall glass of porter and a glistening plate of french
fries at the local pub. We may be killing the planet, but
fuck it, hey, at least we've got french fries.
Leann and I debreifed the
incident. I was surprised to find out she wasn't
scared. I was scared! We both agreed that while
a series of technically appropriate choices had been made, risks
considered and decisions made; the major folly of the day had
been in not trusting our intuition. The day never
felt right, and without any real external information validating that
feeling, we pressed onward toward our eventual unpleasant
outcome. I knew in my gut when I saw the surf at Arch Cape
that things would go poorly, so much so that I almost called off
the landing. Again though, the external information told me
that things would probably be fine, so I made my choice based on that
weighed against the risk of the worst case scenario and the likelihood
of that possibility. My brain told me there was a 1 in 20
chance of a swim, and a 1 in 50 chance of a bad swim, but when
your gut is telling you something perhaps it would make sense to adjust
those odds.
We did some things
wrong, but we also did a lot of things right. Our
kayak had full flotation in it, which is likely why we were able to
recover it at all. We were wearing the maximum amount of
good immersion gear, thousand-dollar drysuits and full body heavy
fleece, which is more important than many people
realize. Few people that haven't directly experienced
such a protracted swim really understand how cold you get and how
fast. IN THESE WATER TEMPERATURES A FARMER JOHN AND A
DRYTOP WILL FREEZE YOU INTO A STATE OF FEEBLENESS IN TEN
MINUTES. So if you are thinking about cold coastal paddling
in that setup, you'd better damn well have a perfect
roll. Physically Leann and I are both very strong and
fitness is a focus in our lives. This gives us not only muscles
and lung capacity, but a mental toughness to push and keep
pushing, in this case, against a strong rip.
Leann is new to kayaking but I've made it my life's passion and I'm
grateful for my experience and intimate knowledge of our coastline to
be able to make choices and predict possible outcomes. Generally
speaking I have a low tolerance for risk, but this time I decided
to roll the dice, accepting the possibility of an unpleasant
outcome in exchange for the certainty of 3 more hours of hard paddling
and an uncertain landing on the other end. In my mind neither
scenario had a clear advantage, but in hindsight, my heart was telling
me the right choice and I wasn't interested in
listening. One lesson here is to trust your gut even
when the desire to be back on dry land calls to you. The
other, and perhaps the more important lesson is one that I try to
instill in every kayaker I meet, in this case I forgot my own
advice:
It's always better to not get
into trouble than to try to get out of it. If it doesn't feel
right, go hiking instead.
My apologies to Leann for the
long swim. My thanks to the lady who gave us a ride.
To the Fire-Rescue people,
we're fine, but you didn't know that. Thanks for trying to save
us!
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