Another Day in Morro Bay

Sometimes things change fast! On September 10 (not that long ago!) we woke up not knowing where we would be going next. By the end of the day Maya had a job and the address for our new apartment. Matt had reserved a trailer and we were already packing. Just as easy as that. We are headed to Phoenix, Arizona. We have wanted to go there for a long time. It was our top choice when we started this whole traveling thing but now that we are in California and were planning to stay a little while we really don’t want to go! It’s just that we’re not leaving on our terms. Someone else decided it would be now. That smarts a little.

We couldn’t leave without one more little adventure. We have wanted to kayak for quite some time. We thought we would go on the river above Florida Caverns or in the sheltered bay off St. George Island. Those didn’t pan out but several places nearby offer kayak trips. There are sea-cave exploring ocean tours and kayak rentals on almost all the beaches in the area. There are also rentals in Morro Bay. We decided that was for us and on Monday (just four days before this posting) we went to Morro Bay again to try our hand at kayaking.

Right across from the public parking lot is the dock for the Sub Sea Tours. They also do kayak rentals so we went there first. Unfortunately it was something called “Cal Poly Week” so they had large back-to-back groups of college students padding down onto that dock and claiming all the paddles. Since Maya’s been jerked around by work recently she didn’t want to wait around and hope there would be a kayak left for us. Matt thought he remembered another place further along the waterfront that also rented kayaks so we set off to find it.

We didn’t, but we stumbled on something even better. Morro Bay is surrounded by State and National parks and one of them rents kayaks and has the good business since to advertise this fact up on the main drag. We saw the sign, picked up the map and went down into the park to the Kayak Shack. There we had no problem getting a kayak because we were the only ones there. The prices were better, and the area of the Bay where you kayak out into is closer to the estuary so there are not pleasure sailboats or fishing vessels all moored around everywhere. That was just fine with us. In the aerial photo below the state marina we left from is in the upper center, far from the city and ships in the upper right. The mud flats of the estuary fill the bottom on the picture.
We have a decent amount of canoe experience thanks to summer camp and the principles of kayaking are about the same. Our two-seater kayak was a bit more stable than a canoe because it rides lower in the water and the paddle is double-ended so you can stroke on either side of the kayak with ease. Other then that it’s all the same stuff. Paddle on the opposite side from the direction you want to turn and remember that you’re going to feel this in the morning. It was great. We went out across the Bay and when we realized that the other side was really far away we turned about and tooled about near some tumbled boulder cliffs called White Point and in the sea grasses of the estuary. According to the High and Low Tides table Matt picked up the afternoon low tide that day was to be at 4:42. We were out in the Bay during the 3:00 hour so we were close to low tide and it was amazing how shallow some places were. We paddled through areas with just inches of water, our kayak scraping the tops of the sea lettuce. While we still cannot say we have kayaked in the ocean, an estuary is close and it only whets out appetite for more!

After we hauled ourselves out of the water, we went up the hill to the Morro Bay Museum of Natural History built into the side of White Point. It had a lot of neat interactive exhibits discussing the various forces of nature that create dunes, estuaries, and lava plug hills and the plant, animal and human interactions that take place in Morro Bay and in the estuary. We also took a short hike up to the top of White Point to get a view of the Bay. Neat!

And with that our blog is up-to-date. It has taken a massive effort, in two big chunks, but now we are caught up. Unfortunately, it is just in time for us to be moving on…