Morro Bay
Started: 2023-07-18 20:45:32
Submitted: 2023-07-18 21:33:29
Visibility: World-readable
Kayaking in Morro Bay
On Monday, the 3rd of July, we headed back to Morro Bay to kayak.
I found the kayak rental shop, named A Kayak Shack, by looking at the map of Morro Bay, thinking that it must be reasonable to kayak across the bay, wondering where the obvious place to put a kayak shop would be, zooming into that part of the map, and finding one right where I expected it to be, at the end of a marina on the south side of town. I assume that I did not actually will it into existence, but rather that I have a well-developed sense of where kayak shops tend to be located.
I paddled a double kayak with Julian, and Kiesa paddled a double kayak with Calvin. We launched under overcast skies and paddled out into the middle of Morro Bay, with the town to the north along the water. Much of the bay is mud flats at low tide, but we were paddling in sufficiently high tide so the water stretched out across the entire width of the bay. Only when we reached the far shore across the bay, along the narrow natural spit of land covered in sand dunes protecting the bay from the open ocean, could I actually touch the muddy bottom of the bay with my paddle.
To the south, I could see what looked like a small barge with a tiny shack floating in the water, near several fields of oyster beds. (I tried to explain the idea of aquaculture to Julian; I'm not sure he understood it.) The far end of the bay to the south was two miles away, just about as far as the horizon was when one is sitting in a kayak. The sky was cloudy enough to obscure the horizon in fog.
Floating in the middle of the bay I tried to get a selfie with the self-timer on my GoPro camera, which worked fine except that I couldn't get the rest of my family to acknowledge the camera (and my aim was a bit off, because I didn't have the immediate feedback of the camera screen to tell me where I was pointing the camera).
We paddled back across the bay and up the mouth of Chorro Creek, forming an estuary between the salt marshes at the edge of the bay. At the mouth of the creek there were several dozen harbor seals hauled out on the bank, so I tried to stay as far away as I could without bothering them, which proved somewhat easier on the way into the estuary than back out because the rising tide was pushing the current (and my kayak) into the mouth of the creek.
I padded into the creek up to the first turn, when I decided there was no other way out of the creek; then turned around to paddle quietly back by the harbor seals and onward to the kayak dock.
We turned in our kayaks and ate lunch at the far end of the parking lot, next to a trail that led around to the far side of the marina, on a peninsula between the marina and the mouth of the creek. Here we got a different perspective on the bay, from slightly higher above the level of the water, at the edge of the salt marshes covering the eastern end of the bay.
The trail looped back on a section of boardwalk in marsh grasses, just above the salt marsh. Some of the interpretive signs talked about pickleweed, a standard feature of the salt marshes along the central California coast, but the pickleweed was not quite as obviously bright red as I'm used to seeing it.
After completing the loop, we drove back to our campsite at San Simeon for the rest of the afternoon on our last full day of our camping trip.
See more pictures from Morro Bay at Photos on 2023-07-03.
