Wow, I thought conditions were wild yesterday. Today the mouth of the channel that leads out from Maliko Gulch looked like death and destruction. Waves smashing on the rocks on both sides of the channel, spray everywhere, huge chop in the channel and whitecaps with spindrift blowing off them outside.
Perfect.
There was even a whale on the upwind side of the channel, about fifty feet from the channel rocks, doing a strange body-flip tail slap that I’ve never seen before, along with pectoral slaps that I swear shook the water. At one point he (or she) looked like a freshly hooked steelhead making it’s first splashy, flashy, pissed off run–if a steelhead was 50 feet long and weighed 45 tons. I thought “you stay over there and I’ll stay over here” as I paddled out. Must have worked, she did.
I was paddling with Randy and Chan, Brian, the other Randy (Royse) and Scott. This was Scott’s first Maliko run, and he was on Tracy Dudley’s F16. While we were getting the boards off the car, Scott set Tracy’s board down and it promptly blew over and whacked it’s rudder. I should have told him how likely that was. People don’t expect a 16 foot board to blow around, but the wind in the gulch is very fluky, and F16s are very light.
Bad news, the rudder was damaged. It looked like it might still be okay, but there was a crack up the side. I might have taken this as God or perhaps Karma’s way of telling me to wait in the jeep. But Scott seems made of sterner stuff. So he and Brian wrapped a little duct pae around the rudder and off they went. As we were paddling out I thought “they should have made a few wraps of that tape, if the fin is cracked up the side it won’t be able to take side thrust”. I kept those cheery thoughts to myself.
I stayed relatively close to Scott for the first third of the paddle. We were going about the same speed, and I wanted to make sure he was OK. I remember my first run pretty clearly. That’s not too hard even for my crusty brain since it w [...]
