When we left off last week, Steve and I were coming down off the bluffs after our morning hike on Santa Cruz Island, getting pumped for our afternoon adventure. And that adventure was – kayaking the sea caves!
The Channel Islands are home to dozens of sea caves across the park. You can see two of them above (along with a very faraway armada of kayakers) in this shot from our morning boat ride in. I was wildly excited to get out on the water. I’ve done lots of calm flatwater kayaking, a tiny bit of eco-touring, and some surf kayaking (as a teenager) but kayaking the sea caves promised to be a new adventure.
My adventure buddy and I made our way to the kayak camp and got suited up in our gear – waterproof jackets (the adventure company provided them but we actually had our own), life jackets and helmets in case of sea cave wall crashing incidents. (Spoiler alert: there were no crashing incidents. But it’s good to be prepared. Safety first!) I was mad at myself for forgetting my paddling gloves – blister city.
We looked so cool in our helmets.
Once we were all suited up, our group made our way to the beach. Adam, our guide, gave a short safety briefing and asked our small group to introduce ourselves and share where we were from, what kayaking experience we had, and what we were hoping to see on the trip.
And then it was time to hit the caves!
Steve and I launched our double kayak last, after an unsuccessful attempt to mount our GoPro to the bow. (Apparently the GoPro surf and kayak mount doesn’t work on sea kayaks’ rough surfaces? That would have been relevant information… Anyway, I tucked it into my life jacket pocket for snapping old-school style.)
And then we were off! We quickly caught up to the rest of the group and listened to Adam discuss the plan of attack for our first sea cave.
And then it was time to run the cave!
IT. WAS. SO. COOL.
We floated around for a few minutes while Adam added more information – more safety chat and cave-running tips, plus some geology facts for more context about the caves we were checking out.
It was dark and spooky! Okay, not really spooky. But definitely dark – and insanely cool. We ended up running about seven caves, and taking multiple passes at a few of them, for a very full and adventurous ninety minutes. Not enough time! We made every second count, and it was an afternoon that I think Steve and I will both remember forever. I’ll let the pictures and videos speak for themselves.
Each of the caves had cool (and slightly intimidating) names. This one, if I recall correctly, was Boatwrecker:
You don’t say…
Once Steve and I had a chance to get comfortable with the kayak – neither one of us had used a double kayak before; we’d always taken singles – I pulled out the GoPro and snapped a few pictures:
After a wonderful and humbling adventure on the water, we reluctantly paddled back to shore and boarded the Island Explorer for our trip back to the mainland. I think we were both sad to leave Santa Cruz Island – I know that I personally felt we’d barely scratched the surface of all the adventure the island had to offer, and it’s not even the only island in the park! But fortunately, the Santa Barbara Channel had a few more treats in store for us to sweeten the trip back.
First of all, the sun finally came out! We didn’t mind the grey skies and seas, but it was a treat to see all that beautiful blue.
Then – as if they knew we needed a little more adventure – we got some visitors.
Dolphins! These guys were so fun and playful as they rode the wake and swam alongside our boat.
Hello down there!
Exhausted and happy, we chugged into Ventura Harbor and past the Channel Islands National Park Visitors’ Center.
I can’t say enough good things about the Channel Islands Adventure Company, who ran the tour, or Adam, our guide. The entire day was well planned and perfectly executed – speaking to the Adventure Company’s expertise at handling these kinds of excursions. As for Adam, he really knew the island and was glad to point out the wildlife we encountered and to answer questions about tides, geography, and anything else we threw at him. Most importantly, he knew the caves like the back of his hand, and he kept the whole group safe throughout the trip. I’d absolutely book another adventure with Channel Islands Adventure Company, and I would recommend them to anyone. (And no, they’re not paying me to say that – they have no idea who I am!)
It was an amazing adventure. I’ll leave you with a couple of the GoPro videos I shot (and please don’t mind my shaky footage; I was using the GoPro, as mentioned above, as a handheld camera since my surf and kayak mount failed me). Really, really epic day…
Crazy Rich Asians (Crazy Rich Asians #1), by Kevin Kwan – I really enjoyed this fun romp through the highest of high Singaporean society. Rachel Chu, all-but “ABC” (American-Born Chinese) little knows what she is getting into when she accepts her boyfriend’s invitation to spend the summer with his “traditional” Singaporean family and be his date to his best friend’s wedding. It turns out that the wedding is the biggest society event in the country and that Nick is heir to a massive fortune and the most eligible bachelor in Asia. As Rachel navigates the treacherous waters of Nick’s disapproving family and the legions of women who will do anything to snatch Nick away from her, Nick’s cousin Astrid is dealing with her own private heartache – oh, and Nick’s mother Eleanor and her Bible study group are determined to get rid of Rachel once and for all. Great literature this is not – but good fun it is, and I am anxiously awaiting the movie.
It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis – I had been waiting and waiting – months, in fact – to cycle to the top of the library wait list and take home Sinclair Lewis’s eerily prescient classic. In It Can’t Happen Here, Lewis illustrates, with terrifying specificity, how Fascism could take hold in America and what the consequences could be. The book was written in 1935, when Fascism was on the rise in Europe but most Americans were blissfully ignorant of the fact, and was Lewis’s wake-up call to a sleeping public. But after the 2016 election and everything that has happened since, it seems all too frighteningly real. Lewis paints in shuddering strokes the picture of an American politician who rides into power on a tide of Populist resentment and then proceeds to grab power from left to right until he has created a dictatorship and Fascist kleptocracy with himself as the center and primary beneficiary. Sound familiar?
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel – This was another one that had been on my list for awhile. Fun Home is Bechdel’s memoir of growing up in a funeral home, her relationship with her father, and her coming out as a lesbian. It’s really engagingly written and drawn, and a fascinating glimpse into another life. (I also know that Bechdel’s work has helped a lot of people on their coming-out journeys, and I think that is really something to celebrate and admire. She has lent her voice and her cartooning skills, and used her platform, in such an admirable way.) I found Bechdel herself to be an engaging and lovable figure in the memoir, and was completely fascinated by her relationships with her parents, and her father in particular. (I also loved the little glimpses into the library of her dad, who was an English teacher and avid reader, and the connection that Bechdel’s own enjoyment of reading gave them – complex and tenuous as that connection may have been.)
The Birchbark House, The Game of Silence, The Porcupine Year, Chickadee, Makoons (Birchbark House #1-5), by Louise Erdrich – Somehow, I only just learned of the Birchbark House books, thanks to a social media post. Someone in my Twitter (or Facebook?) feed wished for a Native American series akin to the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and another user piped up, “There is one – the Birchbark House series by Louise Erdrich.” I immediately dashed (well, cyber-dashed) to my library’s website and reserved the entire series, and I spent about a week and a half tearing through them, laughing and crying and making mental notes about how to make pemmican and preserve seeds (useful information, I think). I laughed a lot, and cried a lot, too. The books follow the life of Omakayas, a young Ojibwe woman, from girlhood through adulthood and motherhood. Omakayas means “Little Frog,” and she was so named because “her first step was a hop.” Adopted as a baby, Omakayas grows up as a treasured daughter, granddaughter, sister and friend. Her life is not without hardship – her family is torn apart by smallpox in the first book (a scene in which I cried floods while reading and floods more while telling a work friend – our firm librarian; hi, Susan! – about the book) but is not without its joys, either. Had these books been published when I was a young reader, I know I would have devoured them. As it is – I devoured them.
covered in flour 