Adam and I had our third outing for the SF Bay Kayak trail.  This time we started in Westpoint Harbor and took out at Baywinds park.  This was a much more eventful journey than the previous ones.  We estimated 11 miles to this leg.

We started off in very calm waters, inside the protected sloughs near Redwood Creek.  We then made our way to Corkscrew Slough and through Bair Island.  We saw lots of harbor seals, and birds.  We even saw a group of goslings.  In the slough is a tidal overflow, which was against us at the time we got to it.  The flow wasn’t that strong so we tried to take it head on.  That didn’t work, and against better judgement, Adam tried to sneak around the edge.  Of course he got caught by the flow, twisted around, and flipped.  The water was pretty shallow so his toe took a beating.  We then portaged around the edge and got our first taste of mud for the day.  Adam’s phone also decided that being waterproof wasn’t really part of it’s job description.

Once we made it out of Corkscrew Slough it was only a little ways along Redwood Shores before reaching the ‘open’ bay.  I didn’t realize how shallow much of the bay is until we were paddling through it.  The draft on Adam’s kayak was a little too deep for some of the parts of the bay that we were paddling through.  Even when we were easily 500 yards off shore the paddles were scraping the bottom.  We ran across a sailboat that didn’t realize the bay was that shallow either.  It was named the Atrea, and based on the decomposition, and lack there of, it hadn’t been there very long.  We continued our journey up to the San Mateo Bridge and crossed under without incident.  However once under the bridge the wind and waves picked up tremendously.  We were at a low enough tide at this point that what usually were underwater sandbars were above water, and we had to portage across to keep going.  The water at this point was shallow enough it was making the paddling pretty difficult.  We made it to ‘shore’ but at the low tide it was actually a large mud flat.  There was about 50 yards of mud between us and the shore.  I was able to use my boat as a sled to get over it, but Adam had to slog through.  His boat wasn’t as good for the sledding motion.  He ended up getting up to his him in mud, but we both made it out alive.  We spent over an hour cleaning our gear with a pathetic little hose.  I have no idea what we would have done if there hadn’t been a hose there.  Baywinds park was gathering a bunch of kiteboarders, who we overheard complaining about the wind dying down and only being 18 knots.  We got a Lyft back to my place and ordered some pizza on our way.  I got everything cleaned up and before people came over for Game of Thrones Steph got back from her martial arts trip.