Boatpost_006 - Park St Bridge @ low tide and another Night Boat in Sausalito

I've been busy these past few weeks and haven't ventured out to any exotic locales for my weekly outdoor trips, but I did manage to make it out to a couple of my favorite nearby spots.

Oakland Estuary

Probably my #1 spot for paddling near home is the Oakland Estuary, the channel separating the island of Alameda from the rest of Oakland. It's a quick bus ride + short walk from my place, with lots of public launch points (I can think of 5-6 off the top of my head).

It's an active urban waterway - the western end is part of the Port of Oakland, and an active shipping channel. I usually launch at Jack London Square towards the center; moving east past Coast Guard Island, under 3 drawbridges, and sometimes looping around San Leandro Bay.

I've seen people on Reddit say that they've seen sharks (harmless friends - 7-gill and leopard sharks) and rays in the narrow section of the San Leandro Bay between Alameda and Bay Farm Island. Now the water in the estuary is brackish and pretty grimy, and therefore basically opaque. So I figured that if I want to see these elusive creatures I should go during low tide, where I could see them more clearly in the shallower water.

I launched at Jack London Public Dock, and finally got a half-decent timelapse of me setting up my boat. (I love the tiny dog photobomb.) This process takes about 15-20 minutes in real time.

This is one of the 2 launches I use the most often on the estuary. It's located right in the middle of Jack London Square, near all of the waterfront restaurants. It's kind of a joint use situation; the dock is used by one of the kayak and paddleboard rental places and is also open to the public. I usually have it all to myself.

I crossed the estuary to the Alameda side, and paddled past Coast Guard Island, saying hi to some of my favorite dorkass boat names, and the two resident Coast Guard cutters.

I made it to the first of the 3 drawbridges, Park Street Bridge. I have been through the bridges a bunch of times, but that day was a minus tide, which means the water was below the normal low tide level.

The piers of this bridge look solid at normal tide levels, with a continuous wall around the base. However, that day I discovered this is not the case. The bridge is actually standing on spindly legs, with the "walls" ending a foot or two below the low tide mark.

These spindly legs are apparently home to an entire underwater Muck World. Completely encrusted in Guys (mussels, barnacles), seaweed, and this strange yellow Entity.

The Entity baffled me for weeks - was it something in the realm of algae or seaweed? Something ancient and unicellular? There's something thrilling about finding a specimen where you're unsure about its place on the tree of life down to the trunk level.

My first few attempts at throwing descriptors at google kept turning up things like slime molds and coral fungus, which it does look very similar to, except those are terrestrial. The tubelike structures made me not quite satisfied with my hunch that it was in the realm of algae or seaweed - they gave me the idea that maybe this was somehow an animal.

A little further googling has me now convinced this IS indeed an animal, possibly a sponge!! A sponge! How exciting. Last year I went tidepooling in a minus tide in Bolinas and saw sea stars, which for someone who grew up in rural Arkansas seemed like one of those things I'd never get to see in real life, especially in the wild. Sponges definitely also fit that category. I didn't even know there were sponges that lived in the intertidal zone, I assumed they were all on the deep seafloor.

These guys are animals, and I am also an animal. What a world.

After that glimpse into a world I felt like I wasn't supposed to see, I made my way to San Leandro Bay to look for the sharks and rays. It turned out to mostly be a mudflat that day, with seagulls and crows walking around where I expected to see sharks. I think I need to come back when it's a low tide, but not a low low tide.

The mudflat was still interesting, so I looked around a bit, and then paddled to the Tidewater Boating Center to pack up and go home. Tidewater is another great launching spot - it's the home of a few local rowing clubs and has a nice, large low freeboard dock, a walking path with benches, and decent bathrooms.

Sausalito Night Boat

I love paddling in Richardson Bay, a small bay off the big Bay, spanning between Sausalito and Mill Valley. It's a relatively easy two-bus or train-and-a-bus trip from my house, and it's got lots to look at - sailboats, big yachts, the world's quirkiest collection of houseboats, and of course lots of seals and waterbirds. I love to go just before sunset, and stay on the water until after the sun goes down.

As the sun goes down, there's a flurry of activity; birds feasting in the open water, boats coming in for the day or leaving for a sunset cruise. I usually see a lot of paddleboarders and a few kayakers as well. The wind usually picks up a bit before sunset, which makes for fun paddling.

After the sun sets, the water is unbelievably peaceful. The temptation to just lay down in my kayak and go to sleep gently bobbing in the waves is unbearable.

That day I launched from the Sausalito Public Dock, which is right on the main drag in Sausalito, between two popular waterfront restaurants. There are a couple of other launch points in Richardson Bay - a beach a little ways up in Dunphy Park, and and another dock even further up in Bayfront Park in Mill Valley.

I first paddled a little ways south towards the mouth of the bay, stopping to see the Seal Barge (idk, some kind of half submerged structure that always has seals laying on it in a neat row like a pack of hotdogs). Imagine that I managed to get the heron's head in frame and that my boat didn't float away mid-shot.

I paddled out as far as the Spinnaker restaurant, beyond which the bay opens up into the greater San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate. As soon as I have the restaurant in sight, I can already start to feel the swell of the open water, and my boat starts eerily bobbing up and down. I probably shouldn't go past this point in this boat, but I want to so bad. Good motivation to save up for a seafaring vessel of some sort.

After dipping my toe in the no-go zone, I turned around and made my way north. I paddled under the Richardson Bridge on-ramp, past Bothin Marsh, and finally ended up in Pickleweed Inlet, at the source of the bay. I "parked" my boat for a minute to get out and stretch my legs and put the lights on my boat, as it was starting to get dark.

Setting up at the dock, I heard footsteps, and could feel it in my bones that I was about to have a cute conversation with a (harmlessly) nosy older person. I was right. A woman in her 70s or 80s came up and said "I'd love to hear about your kayak!"

I told her how it works, how it all folds into a backpack and how the backpack origamis into the boat seat. She asked how heavy it was, I said "not as heavy as it looks for the size, but I'm a backpacker so I'm used to carrying giant backpacks." She said she also used to be a backpacker! and that she has a hard-shell kayak at home that she can't use as much anymore due to shoulder pain that makes lifting it onto and off of her roof rack difficult.

I told her this is definitely at least lighter than her kayak, and probably easier to maneuver since it's more compact when folded up, and that maybe it was an option to consider. I hope she looks into it and is able to get back out on the water!

She wished me a good rest of my paddle, and I took off back towards the dock in Sausalito. The water got pretty spicy between here and the bridge, and I had to basically paddle perpendicular to the direction of travel to keep from getting swept away. After the bridge the wind died down almost completely, and the nighttime peace set in.

I finally made it back, and caught my bus home. I had a minor mishap at the dock, somehow the first time I've done this - I threw my paddle on the dock as usual before getting out, but I got distracted looking for my water bottle down by my feet and drifted a few feet from the dock, sans paddle. I did a frantic, undignified doggy paddle with my hands over the side of the boat, and finally managed to grab the dock. Whew. Averted real disaster this time.

Boatpost_002 - Paddling in a “real” location and dropping my phone in the bay

Not even The Bay, which would’ve made for a better story. More on that later. So after a couple trips to Lake Merritt in my new boat, I decided I was ready to venture out into bigger waters. I did some research, and found a couple of public launches on

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