red alder ranch

Last Wednesday, Ginni and I took a trip down the northern part of the Oregon coast, doing some reconnaissance for Columbia River Kayaking’s upcoming coastal expedition. The original plan was to start out in the morning at the entrance to Tillamook Bay, put in the kayaks and paddle 20 miles or so south to Cape Lookout State Park, which will be one of our campsites on the expedition.

We spent the night camped out at Revolution Gardens in Nehalem, home to Brian of Cape Falcon Kayak and his land partner Ginger. We borrowed his Toyota truck the next morning and shuttled it down to Cape Lookout and then headed back up to Tillamook Bay with the car and the kayaks. But when we got to the north jetty at Tillamook Bay, the wind was blowing hard out of the north, and the sea was covered in large whitecaps. We listened to the weather report on the VHF, and NOAA was calling for winds between 17 and 20, climbing to 25 later in the day with gusts to 30 knots. Wind waves were out of the NNW at 6-7 feet, with a west swell of 4 feet at 10 seconds. It felt like it was already blowing harder than 20, and it was only 11 AM.

I have spent some time on the ocean in powerboats, and a little time near the ocean in my kayak, but these conditions were right up against my comfort and experience level. Neither of us were feeling at the top of our game, and if we put in here, we would be pretty much committed to the 20 mile trip down to the truck, or we would have to hitchhike to the truck from wherever we decided to bail out short of that.

So we decided to start driving south, do some research on camping spots and potential bail-out options and wait and see if an opportunity presented itself to get out on the water. We had a good time driving around finding little beaches and plugging waypoints into the GPS unit. When we got to Oceanside, conditions looked more favorable for launching, and now we were only 8 miles or so from the truck, so if something went wrong, it was less of a commitment to reach the park.

So we got on our gear and packed the boats, being careful not to forget the keys to the truck, and got on the water at 3 PM. The Goldfish crackers I bought in memory of Tom, who was a big fan of them.

The wind was still quite strong and the wind waves and swell were pretty much as predicted, but I found that I was not as uncomfortable out there as I had anticipated that I would be. The wind and current were at our backs and we made pretty good time towards Cape Lookout. We got lots of good rides on wind waves and the GPS said that I hit a breakneck 11.2 mph on one of these waves.

I did not get seasick; I usually don’t, but I did discover the limits of having your drinks in a day hatch in seas like this. With waves constantly breaking over the deck of the boat, I really didn’t want to open my day hatch for fear of it filling with water. I finally had to stop and get a drink though, as I was starting to feel a little woozy and dehydrated. I set myself up so I could watch the oncoming waves while I had my day hatch open. I downed a whole bottle of grapefruit juice in a minute or so, and immediately started feeling much better.

When we were a mile or so from the waypoint I had put in the GPS earlier at the Cape Lookout parking lot, we decided to practice some rescues, so we each capsized and did a re-enter and roll and then a T-resuce on each other. Damn, that ocean is cold!

Now it was time to get ashore, and this is the part that I have the least experience with: surf landings. I have played in the small stuff here and there, and have been rolled around and roughed up a bit by the surf, but what we were looking at now was several sizes larger and rougher looking than anything I had been in before. We slipped in sideways to the shore to get inside of a rough outside break and then Ginni went on ahead and disappeared behind the waves. I came along behind much more slowly, trying NOT to surf as many of the waves as I could, letting them pass underneath me instead. Eventually though, I got into the zone where the waves were breaking very close to each other, and I got caught by surprise by one that towered over my head for a moment, just before it caught my boat and rolled me upside down towards the beach, in spite of my best efforts at bracing to seaward.

The last time I played in the surf, I was reminded that I needed to wait a bit before rolling up, and so I tried to stay curled up on my front deck while the surf shook me and tossed my kayak around. The water got a hold of my paddle a little bit and pulled me part of the way out of my cockpit, but I stayed in and when things calmed down a few seconds later, I scooted myself back into the cockpit and rolled back up again…just in time to get hammered by the next wave!

This time though, I was able to low brace hard to seaward, and I didn’t get rolled upside down, although I was completely underneath a big pile of foamy water. After a few smaller rides and some well braced side surfing, I finally arrived at the beach, where the next challenge was to avoid crashing sideways into the tourists, smiling and wading knee deep in the water, blissfully unaware of the damage my kayak could do to them if we were to collide.

Obviously, I got no pictures of all of this! When I got to shore, my pump that was stowed under the deck lines was all tangled up, and my chart case was wadded into a ball at the rear of my front deck, but I was otherwise unscathed. Ginni had gotten beaten up worse though; the surf tried to pull her helmet off and wrenched her neck around in the process. She was sore, and declared it to be the worst beating she remembers getting in the surf. I was glad I got it easier than that!

We spent the next half hour or so cleaning up, rinsing gear, changing into dry clothes and loading up the truck. And snacking on goldfish crackers, too, before heading north, to return Brian’s truck and head home. What a day!

The expedition starts next Monday morning, and we won’t be landing on that beach again if we can help it!

I just spent an hour writing, reading and then rewriting this post. It seems so inadequate, and so flat when compared to the task I am trying to undertake. But I don’t think I can do much better right now.

This afternoon I was hit with some shocking and sad news. I turned on the radio as I was driving down to work and heard the end of a story about a helicopter crash near Flagstaff, AZ, last Sunday, June 29. Two air ambulances collided in midair, killing six of the seven people aboard. When I got to the office I looked up the news on Google, fearing the worst, and my heart sank when I saw my friend and mentor, Tom Clausing, listed among the dead in an article on the KNXV-TV Phoenix news site.

I went back and re read the article twice, hoping I had somehow misconstrued what I read, but it was plain and clear.

Way back in March, I wrote a blog post about the Wilderness First Responder class that we host here every year. For the past two years, Tom Clausing has been our lead instructor, and I consider myself privileged to have had someone so talented and easy to work with as an instructor. I have taken the WFR class four times, and a full EMT course, and I have to say that Tom was the person I got the most from, hands down. I consider the instruction I got from Tom to be of far more use to me than most of the lectures I received from doctors in my EMT classes. I had been planning for a year or so to take the Wilderness upgrade to my EMT license from Tom’s company in Leavenworth.

He literally “wrote the book”, or at least one of them, for wilderness EMS instruction; our workbook that was filled with scenarios for us to analyze and write reports on was written by Tom, and included many real-life wilderness emergencies that he and other wilderness medics had responded to. Many of the photographs that were incorporated into our classes were taken by Tom while on the job in one location or another.

One of Tom’s jobs was as a wilderness paramedic in the Grand Canyon National Park, and he flew on helicopters as a flight paramedic routinely as part of this job. He had a lot to say about helicopters, and we tried two years in a row to arrange a Coast Guard helicopter to show up for one the WFR sims. I had finally worked the bugs out of communicating with the right person in the CG chain of command and Tom and I were certain that next year we would be able to put it all together for a helicopter to show up.

One of the things that he said about helicopters, which I will remember forever, doubly so now, was that they are basically big balls of tinfoil, full of fuel, just waiting for an opportunity to fall out of the sky and burst into flames.

The details of the accident are of course still under investigation, and probably will be for a long time, but from reading the articles that I have found on the internet, it appears that the helicopter that Tom was riding on was carrying a fire fighter who had experienced anaphylaxis to the hospital in Flagstaff, when it collided with another helicopter, transporting a patient from another hospital to the same one in Flagstaff that Tom’s chopper was headed for. For some unknown reason, they collided in midair near the hospital. Six of the seven people aboard both helicopters were killed and the seventh, a flight nurse on Tom’s helicopter, was listed in critical condition as of July 2nd. Basically, both choppers found the opportunity to fall out of the sky and burst into flames.

The last time I saw him, he had just finished loading up his old red Suburban with all the gear from the class, and was heading back to his home in Leavenworth, WA. He handed me a helicopter magazine as he was headed out to his rig. We parted ways laughing and thanking each other for a great week, and looking forward to next year.

I took so many pictures during that WFR class, but none of Tom specifically. I found this one of him watching the “litter packaging race”. I’m so frustrated and annoyed with myself that I don’t have any proper pictures of Tom, out of all those frames I took.

I had assumed that I would be working with, and learning from Tom Clausing for years to come. It is so shocking to realize that I will not see him again. I will miss him a lot, especially so every February, during WFR class.

Here is an online guest book that you can leave your condolences in, and another article about the accident is here. An article that talks more about Tom than the crash can be found here, at the Wenatchee World.

Post Script:

After doing some more online research, I found that the flight nurse who had initially survived in critical condition, died on Friday after being removed from life support. He was 36, with a wife and three children.

This is a trip I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I’ve paddled from Skamokawa to Astoria several times in the last couple of years, and the last time I went down there, I felt like I had energy to spare and joked with my clients that we should paddle back with the flood tide. They looked at me like I was crazy…

It is about 19 miles or so to paddle from Skamoakwa to Astoria, and so doubling that would come in at just under 40 miles, the longest paddling day I’ve ever done. When Ginni and I were building the schedule a few weeks ago, we were looking for a compatible tide series for this trip, and the only one that was available to us demanded a 4 AM departure from Skamokawa. We looked at each other and said, “Why not?”

The plan was to paddle to Astoria on the ebb tide, arrive around 8:30 or so, and eat breakfast at the Blue Scorcher bakery, just a couple of blocks up the hill from the Maritime Museum. Then when the tide turned, we would head back upstream to Skamokawa.

So we dragged our butts out of bed at an unnatural hour, made our way down to the dock, and set out downstream, leaving Skamokawa at 5 AM. There was a strong current flowing out and my new GPS showed us zipping along at 7 mph. Ginni borrowed the GPS and got her kayak up to 8.5 mph for a moment.

Down below Miller Sands, where the shipping channel turns towards Astoria, the dredge equipment was working, and we also saw this buoy, tangled in several hundred feet of gillnet. I’ll digress here for a minute. First of all, these nets are not cheap! Why anybody would lay out thousands of dollars worth of net in a place where they would risk tangling it this severely is beyond me. And it wasn’t just snagged on the end, either; whoever did this evidently drifted down on this buoy with the net strung out for hundreds of feet on both sides of it. But what really gets me is that after it tangled on the buoy, they just cut it loose and abandoned it, as a hazard to fish and to navigation. The bright side of this story is by the time we passed this buoy again on the way home, the guys running the dredge equipment had removed the net and piled it on one of their barges.

That last leg of the paddle from Rice Island to Astoria is a long one, since the destination is in plain sight for so long, without seeming to get much closer. Finally we starting pulling up on Tongue Point, just east of town.

By this time, we were starting to smell the cinnamon rolls and coffee!

Not long after, we were pulling into the East Mooring Basin to see if there were any lingering sea lions hanging around. We only saw one, apparently not with the program as most of the rest of the gang is off to California to the breeding grounds.

Here’s a great name for a fishing boat, huh? And a bottom dragger to boot! Last year, the trawling industry here was hit with scandal when they were caught dumping and grinding up protected rockfish bycatch to prevent their whiting season from being shut down. Nice, huh? Little was done about it and they continued to fish for whiting even after being caught cheating the system. And this year, when salmon fishing is sharply curtailed all up and down the coast, the trawl industry gets to kill 11,000 Chinook salmon as bycatch. Can you tell I’m not a fan of the trawl boats?

I don’t know much about this boat, except that it is an old, out of service pilot boat. It is a beauty though, with such a great color scheme. Here’s what I found when I googled it.

We paddled under the old red cannery building that was so damaged in last winter’s windstorm and then up to the dock at the Columbia River Maritime Museum. The mileage to this point, measured by GPS, was 19.4 statute miles and we did it in 3 hours and 15 minutes. Not too bad! But we knew the return trip wouldn’t be so quick…

After changing into “cilvilian” clothes and stowing the kayaks, we headed up to the bakery, where we spent an hour or so hanging out drinking coffee and eating breakfast. Josh looks like he’s still asleep though!

We got back on the water about 10:30, when we saw the ships at anchor starting to swing around with the change of the tide, and headed back past Tongue Point, where we saw four or five sturgeon jumping and rolling in just a few hundred yards. What makes them do that?

While our average speed on the downriver leg was 6.4 mph, now we were only averaging 4.3, and as we pulled alongside Rice Island and the dredge equipment again, the wind was starting to blow. We stopped on Miller Sands for a quick break and then continued on.

This part of the trip was much less smooth than the first part, and we were soon surfing wind waves, and, around 30 miles or so, were starting to feel a bit tired! We took another break below Jim Crow Point and then got back to work for the last 5 miles or so. This part of the trip had only taken 50 minutes earlier in the day, now it took almost twice that! As we were pulling up next to Skamokwa, we were actually starting to notice an ebb current again.

We finished the trip back at our home dock at 4 PM, eleven hours after we had begun. We covered 39.2 miles in eight hours and five minutes of paddling time, according to the GPS. We were tired, my drysuit was leaking and our boats seemed heavier than ever before as we carried them up the ramp to the paddle center. I joked that next time we should do the same trip in whitewater boats, just to keep things interesting. Oddly, there wasn’t a lot of enthusiasm for that idea….

More late blog entires…

Way back on the 21st of June, Columbia River Kayaking held a surf class at Cannon Beach, OR. We had a great time playing in the waves, capsizing and rescuing ourselves and each other and getting our sinuses well filled with salt water. I’ll leave out most of the words this time and just put some pictures up for you to enjoy.