Exploring Mendocino’s Caves and Cliffs with Skip Pauls

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In this episode of The Dubcast with Dubside, Dubside sits down with longtime friend and expedition paddler Skip Pauls on San Juan Island to trace a lifetime of sea kayaking. Skip recalls cutting his teeth on long-distance days along the New England shoreline—circumnavigating Cape Ann, crossing from Plymouth to Provincetown, and threading the islands of Maine—before discovering the raw, three-dimensional coastline of Mendocino, California.

From solo explorations of unmapped sea caves and surge channels to bull kelp forests, abalone divers, near-misses in rock gardens, and an unforgettable close encounter with a gray whale in stormy seas, Skip paints a vivid portrait of what it means to really know a coastline. Along the way he reflects on mentors, boat choice, safety, and the unique headspace required to paddle big water day after day.

Transcript

[ANDREW]
This episode of The Dubcast with Dubside was recorded on video, which you can find on my YouTube channel. I'll put the link in the show notes. 

Last June, in the week before SSTIKS, the South Sound Traditional Inuit Kayak Symposium, Dubside and I walked onto an early morning ferry at Anacortes and headed for Friday Harbor in the San Juan Islands.

This ferry ride was just one leg of a longer road trip, stopping to see old friends and returning to places that shaped us as paddlers.

[DUBSIDE]
The San Juan Islands out here are a great paddling area, because you have real currents and tides out here and real conditions. When I say “real” I mean, you can be on your little lake, or river, or even some place like Philadelphia which has got ships and tugs, but out here, the current and the weather conditions can really creep up on you, and this is not a place for beginners. And those disaster stories you can read about in the “Deep Trouble” books, a lot of them take place right out here, because somebody saw this beautiful water and went to, got their $400 recreational kayak and thought it would be a good idea to just put it on the beach here and come out and paddle, and got into big trouble. 

When I first paddled from Orcas out to, what's the one out there, is it Sucia Island? One of the ones way out there far, far north. We were out there with some other folks and we're paddling to get there and we're paddling and we're paddling and paddling. 

And somebody who knew something, who had taken some training from Leon and Shauna said, we can't keep doing this because they could see from looking in relation to where we were, the current was too strong there. We were making no headway. We were just spinning our wheels. It felt like we were going somewhere because the current was moving so much.

We had to cut at a different angle and ferry over a little bit more to get out of that current to actually make it to where we were going to go. If we just kept on heading there, we'd have stayed there for another couple hours until the current completely switched around. So you have to know stuff like that when you're out here.

As well as to go to this remote island, you have to really watch the weather because if the wrong wind kicks up, you can get stuck out there and not be able to get back for a day or more. And it takes some careful planning. So not a place for beginners.

So right now we're going to see Skip Pauls, who back in 2008 or 9 or something like that, he wrote a letter to me, which was my main method of communication back then and still can be used. We put a stamp on an envelope, put it in the mail. And he said he was a paddler in Mendocino, California.

And he enjoyed, I guess he'd seen my videos and things and used a Greenland paddle. And he told me anytime I was in that area, I should look him up. So I was able to do that at some point later.

And Mendocino is an amazing area with the geology there. There are all these caves and some even tunnels that you can paddle through if you've got to know what time the tide is, and pay attention to that. It's right on the coast. It's the ocean there. And he had it all figured out.

And at that time, I don't think it was a big destination sea kayak area because there weren't a whole lot of people in the area doing that. But he had learned all the different passages and cool places to go. And he took us out there.

A couple of times I visited him there. And we had quite a nice time. And then he, he, that TAKS  event that lasted for five years—Traditional Arctic Kayaks Symposium which was held on various locations on the California coast—one year they had it there in Mendocino. I think that, yeah, Maligiaq came that time. And so he was, I don't know if you'd say hosting the event, but his location was hosting the event.

But he eventually moved up here to the San Juans. He had a very busy job within IT and he had to take care of that. So I would often call him every, every couple of years. And sometimes he would get back to me and sometimes he was too busy, but it's nice to keep in touch with him. So he has a less hectic job now. And so I'm looking forward to, I haven't seen him since quite a, quite a couple of years before COVID.

So it's been a while.

[ANDREW
As the ferry threaded its way through the islands, I thought back to my first kayak camping trips here years ago, when I found myself more than once stranded by dense fog, unable to see well enough to commit to a channel crossing before the tide turned, knowing that once it did, the crossing would no longer be possible. It is precisely these challenges of fog and current that make the San Juan Islands one of the most captivating places for sea kayaking. 

When we landed in Friday Harbor, Skip was waiting for us at the dock. He loaded our gear into his truck and drove us to his house, where we sat down and began to talk about his journey, from cold, demanding crossings along the New England coast to the raw surge channels and honeycombed caves of Mendocino, and spoke about what it truly means to know a piece of shoreline.

[DUBSIDE]
So today is June 5th, 2005, and I am sitting on beautiful San Juan Island with a friend from way back, Skip Pauls. How's it going, Skip?

[SKIP]
Good, it's great to have you here.

[DUBSIDE]
Welcome to the Dubcast with Dubside.

[SKIP]
Thanks for having me.

[DUBSIDE]
So I want you to tell me about all the paddling you've done and all the cool places you've paddled and some of your favorite places to go. And you started out paddling…?

[SKIP]
Yeah, I started getting on the water in the late 90s, like the end of the 90s. I decided I was going to get in a boat and go out on my own at the time we lived in Boston area. So I jumped in...

[DUBSIDE] 
East Coast, all right. 

[SKIP] 
East Coast. So back then, I didn't know anything about anything. I grabbed a sit on top and jumped in on a foggy morning to crack a dawn in Essex and paddled out into the bay and was hooked. And then once you get a taste of it, I need to ramp up my skills. So I found some people that could give me proper instruction.

[DUBSIDE]
When did you switch from a sit on top to...

[SKIP]
Almost immediately. As soon as I looked into what... learned about British boats, you're not going to learn to roll with a sit on top unless you're Dubside and want to show that it can be done.

So I immediately got with a group that was using British boats. And the group there, that was the Charles River Canoe and Kayak Company, which I still revere because they had some leaders there that their trips were...

He kind of would handpick the people he was willing to take out on these more extreme kind of every other week trips. And through them, we did some really ramped up the distance over the next few years, doing pretty much every bit of the New England coastline. We'd paddle from Plymouth to Provincetown, which is like a 20 mile crossing.

And there, the elevations are super low. So you're paddling straight out into open sea for hours before you start to see any indication…

[DUBSIDE]
So what do we got here? This is not a drone.

[SKIP]
No, no, it's a little... The airport's about three miles away over there. It's a little puddle hopper.

So yeah, through them, I paddled literally every every inch of certainly Massachusetts, of Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, all of the Elizabeth Islands down to Cuttyhunk and Buzzards Bay and all of the Cape, every bit of the Cape, outside and inside and up north, up to North Shore. Cape Ann is what they call North Shore area. It's basically an island that has a channel that separates it from the mainland. It's about a 20 mile round trip. You go out of Gloucester and you go out and open oceanside and come back around the north. And we do a bunch of those kind of circumnav of Cape Ann.

And so I was doing, I was there for like 10 years. We'd go up…New Hampshire has a little tiny bite of the coast, like it's got a river mouth and Portsmouth, which is like the only interesting coastal part of New Hampshire.

And then then you get into Maine. And we did a lot of the…or I either soloed or went with a friend or two at most to do a lot of the Maine Island Sea Trail, which is like a collective of, if you're a member, you can camp on these little tiny nuggets of islands all up and down the Maine coast. 

And we did all the, all the sounds. There's Sebasko Deegan, Penobscot and all the way up to what they call down east. Like you go beyond Bar Harbor and then it becomes much more exposed. It's no longer like sounds and things like that. You're on open coast.

[DUBSIDE]
How long trips were these?

[SKIP]
Those are typically these. This was what this was the mark left on me by the guy at Canoe, Charles River Canoe and Kayak was miles were really not a thing. These were, I mean, not a consideration.

Like every trip with him was usually like a 15 to 20 mile day. And that would that was what enabled you to do like Martha's Vineyard circumnavigation or down to the bottom of the Elizabeth Islands and back to Woods Hole in one day. And they were long days.

And that's kind of how that was the mindset that I had for if I was going to go kayaking, it was going to be a lot of miles and just take whatever situations we had come to.

[DUBSIDE]
What kayak were you paddling back then?

[SKIP]
Back then? So the first serious boat I bought was a Diamante made by Impex.

It was a little bit beamy, but it was really rockered for the day. It was a so and since we were offshore a lot, it surfed nicely. It just handled really beautifully. And I was comfortable in it for long days and I could paddle it fast and straight. And it was, I had that boat for probably 12 years. It was on the heavier side, but I could shoulder it and handle it myself.

So we we do a lot of dune hopping like you kind of cross from one side of the other out toward Great Point and Nantucket. You do a lot from the tidal areas out to the ocean side kind of run back and forth.

[DUBSIDE]
You were doing that year round?

[SKIP]
Yeah, I paddled every month of the year in New England. So we do… Cape Ann had a lot of little coves that in winter you could actually do some ice breaking. I mean, it's kind of silly, but you'd be out in the open.

We had gear for that. I'd gear up for that. I'd dry suit with a 300 weight fleece one piece underneath and heavy mitts.

I never liked gloves. I never liked paddling in gloves because I have circulation issues. So even the smallest or lightest glove would kind of create some restriction on my blood flow.

So I really liked big mitts. They do everything you need. But yeah, you could get inside in winter. The inner waters of the little coves and bays would freeze up at the edges. So you kind of poke in there and do a little ice breaking. But it was very like, you know, 20 degree days with a good 15 knot wind. That's cold. That's a cold time to be in the water.

[DUBSIDE]
We call any any incidents or dangerous things, close calls or any significant…

[SKIP]
There's kind of a joke in the in the Star Trek world where it’s… I'm not a super Trekkie, but the joke is like, you know, Captain Kirk, Spock and Dr. McCoy and Ensign Wojoho, all beam down to the planet surface, which one's not going to be coming back? So there was usually on these long day trips, there was always like the “wild card”, like we all kind of knew each other. It wasn't a formal group, but it was usually the same core people that were no knew what we were getting into as a long day.

And then there was the guy we hadn't paddled with before. He was usually the source of either like a shortened trip or something going sideways. So that also drove me to a lot of my later years of just being a solo paddler.

When we got to Mendocino, I was.

[DUBSIDE]
So no, no, no. Call the Coast Guard incidents or…?

[SKIP]
No, we got you know, we got yelled at a few times in the fog by Martha's Vineyard ferries because they come and go from Woods Hole. And we we were supposed to ferry… This is under the leadership of the trip lead that knew all the islands.  It was kind of early days. This isn't a tragedy or an on the water thing, but we ended up having to paddle back across Vineyard Sound to get back to Woods Hole because we missed the ferry that we were supposed to be on. And then there was a fog coming in and we got in the ferry lanes and there they're pretty grumpy about anyone being in the ferry lanes.

So they came. They had the—I don't remember what group it is—but when we landed, they came and chewed out the trip lead about getting in.

But we had VHF, we carried VHF, we were fully geared, knew what we were doing. 

Woods Hole is a great place to train in. We did a lot of BCU training in Woods Hole. And the idea there was to take a less experienced group out into the into the currents there. They're like four or five knots. The big channel, the cans will just sit over on their side for hours during peak, or for an hour during peak.

And but we we just take people out there and then create a situation like ferries coming. People have gone over in the current and do rescues. That was where I met in New England was Derek Hutchinson would come occasionally and a lot of my BCU instruction.

[DUBSIDE]
Instruction or to paddle?

[SKIP]
Yeah, both. He was at that point. He wouldn't run workshops, but he would show up at like our midwinter rolling sessions, pools and things, because he knew, I guess, a lot of the instructors there.

Rhode Island was another great place to paddle. Like Block Island is 10 miles offshore. And again, these are low elevation, glacial moraine things. So you put in a Port Judith and say, oh, we're paddling to to Block Island and you can't see it.

You paddle for an hour or two before it comes into view like a little mound in the distance. And the plan that those days was to ferry back. But we get over there. It's a beautiful day. And then the group was good. And so we just paddle back. So those were like 20 mile days just without any thinking about it.

[DUBSIDE]
What can you tell me about Derek Hutchinson's personality?

[SKIP]
I guess, you know, I think he's exactly what you would imagine him to be is a little little gruff, intentionally full of himself. Like, you know, I didn't really want to hear about what you had done or having to hear any of your stories. And he did a lot of the, you know, like one arm, like paddle behind the head kind of trademark move.

Yeah. All the trademark moves. And but he was I was it was early days back then.

So I had just learned to roll. So then the main guy shows up on the scene and you're kind of enamored and try to engage in conversation. And he is not a big conversationalist, but he would show up at these things just to kind of be there and throw some pointers out to people or criticize what they thought they were doing right. And he was a funny guy. Very British. I spent a lot of time in England for work. And so I know that I got to see a lot of Brits. He was a good one. So that was those early days.

[DUBSIDE]
How do we get to Mendocino, the West Coast?

[SKIP]
Yeah. So on I did it in a couple of steps.

My wife at the time was from the West Coast and we kind of she'd always wanted to move back there. We got dislodged from New England after 10 years. 

I went through Houston for a company move. Houston's not worth mentioning other than that. If you're a kayaker, it's not just kind of difficult place to be.

[DUBSIDE]
I heart the water is really muddy.

[SKIP]
The water is really brown and hot. There's no cool time of year to paddle, really.

I tried. I did try to find some people to get on water with. You can go down into Galveston Bay. But my two or three attempts…

[DUBSIDE]
From the reference point of where you started paddling, I guess Houston is not a very cool place.

[SKIP]
It was hot and I was being eaten by mosquitoes while trying to do a rolling session. And just like, it was rough. So that was I had a brief hiatus from kayaking and I thought, OK, I'm going to take up sailing. People sail here. I went through all the ACA training and did offshore navigation and went in some big keelboats and did stuff.

[DUBSIDE]
ACA training for sailing?

[SKIP]
ASA. Sorry.

[DUBSIDE]
ASA.

[SKIP]
And I was there for like a year and did sailing and things, but then I couldn't take Houston. So we moved to the San Juans and that was my first…this is back in 2003 and we were on Orcas. And so I paddled the San Juans for like two, three years. We weren't there very long, but coming from something that's ocean side to a sound, it's very it was all about the currents and wind and storms and things like that. So you would go out in storms to get a little bit of action and learned currents. But the scenery was just eye popping. So I really enjoyed that first round in the San Juans. 

For family reasons, we ended up moving to northern California from here, from Orcas, we went to Mendocino. It was one of the… I needed to convince someone to go with me and I needed to convince them that it had to be a place that was as scenic or more scenic than Orcas. So I took them to Mendocino.

[DUBSIDE]
For my international listeners. So the San Juan Islands are the north northwest corner of the state of Washington, northwest corner of the continental United States. And in the San Juans, we mentioned Orcas Island, San Juan Island.

There's some other islands. And so so now you're going down to California, which is several hundred miles to the south along the coast of the US.

[SKIP]
Right. But about six or 700 miles south of the San Juans is northern California, is a very it is its coastal, Pacific coast on steroids. It's it's bigger and more that there's no the difference between West Coast and East Coast having paddle both.

The East Coast has a continental shelf about 100 miles out that will take a lot of the energy out of the big ocean swell. So by the time whatever you see on the ocean side and the East Coast and New England is somewhat had some of the energy knocked out of it. 

California and the West Coast doesn't have a continental shelf. So the stuff that's been building all the way across the Pacific or out of the last Bay of Alaska and things come straight down and hammers into these into the cliffs. So it's it's always big and there's always a swell. 

So, and I didn't know about this. I hadn't paddled that kind of beefy, raw ocean up against cliffs, nowhere to hide kind of thing before. And but I didn't I don't think I appreciated the difference yet when I first arrived there. 

I didn't jump right in the water when we got to Mendocino. I didn't know anybody there. I just kind of couch scouted where I was going to try to get in the water. The coast features a lot of cliffs with inland rivers that kind of creaks that flow out into the ocean and they call them “dog holes” because they're a break in the cliffs that's from a big logging, 19th century logging ship perspective, they were big enough to kind of go in turn around and go back out. There's not much of a bay there but there were little tiny embayments that had a river flowing out into them. That was usually where you could access the ocean was to put into one of these the rivers just inside these dog holes or little tiny bays.

A lot of them are state parks in California so you're lucky you have permission to do that. You just pull down, pull in a parking lot

My first outing I scouted it was just a six mile run down the down the coast. I had my wife drop me off and was going to pick me up at one of the other river mouths. At this point I was a 12 or 15 year paddler and I'd done everything I could do in the San Juans. I went down there and I put in one of these dog holes and it was like I hadn't really learned, I'd had no intuition or feel for swell reports yet, like what sea state would be like on a six foot day. 

Usually other than October, four to six foot day was just every day. That was a small day in Mendocino was a four to six foot sea 

My first outing I put in in Caspar at Caspar beach near the town of Caspar and it's like a mile paddle out to the mouth where you get to the the real open swell and I got out that far and realized this is much bigger than anything I've ever paddled before and I'm out there alone. I don't know the coast, I don't know the shoreline or yet how to read surge zones and things like that at this scale of of swell, but I just head down turned left and headed south. But suddenly you're surrounded even on a six foot day in a in a good boat it's like you're surrounded by houses. You're just the swell, waves, no line of sight and I didn't know where I was but I had my VHF and dry suit I was geared up properly I just head down and started paddling and that was my first taste of the sea state there, how much bigger it was than anywhere else I would ever paddle.

I've had a lot of southern California and everywhere else. Nothing really compares to like the Oregon and northern California in terms of scale.

But I made it down to Big River. And Big River just seemed like a river flowing out into the bay but I did not realize that it was also a really big surf spot. I’m fully comfortable with surf landings and things but this was these were 12 foot 15 foot waves that had built during my time on the water the hour or two I'd been on the water I got down there and that was this huge swell smashing into Big River so I had to do a surf landing in a beach I didn't know anything about plus the amount of current coming out of Big River is big enough that as you get close to shore you know you'll stall out trying to land on the beach because if you get pushed back now you're sitting right in the break zone and this is all just like okay seat of my pants learn what to do what not to do and when to do it there. 

But long story short, Mendocino is an incredibly three-dimensional place to paddle. It’s it's caves. It's tunnels. It's arches for 20 miles. Like that whole stretch of coast is some of the most interesting shoreline you'll ever experience, because it is three-dimensional, both the swells changing the height of an arch by half. By the time you paddle through…

[DUBSIDE]
I've been to a few, what they you know say, we’re going to go to a sea cave and yeah you get inside. In Mendocino it's like honeycombed.

[SKIP]
It's honeycombed. And there's no map of that stuff. Literally there was there's no guide to that coast. So I would go out three times a week. We lived right by the water. And I had a job, I was working from home. I could just pick my days, like afternoon I'll just go drop in and I just made it a point. 
 
I had some bread and butter paddles that I eventually got used to. I knew what I would do from Russian Gulch around Mendocino headlands, work your way into the headlands and there's just a lot of surge zone, a lot of caves that are safe or not safe to go into under all kinds of different conditions. 

But the thing, the constant for like three years was I paddled alone, so I was experiencing all this you know, setting my own lines that I wouldn't cross, like what I was willing to do by myself and not do But I did kind of map out everything from north of Fort Bragg down to south of Elk, almost to Anchor Bay, and there's a group of rocks there, Anchor Bay rocks But I paddled every every inch of those coastlines for years and knew all the caves and fun places to paddle

[DUBSIDE]
I would say then that as Warren Williamson is to Deception Pass, Skip Paul's is to Mendocino coastline there.
 
[SKIP]
I guess for better or worse. The fun part came when you like I built it was just something I needed to do to satisfy my own initiatives, but at some point um I encounter an individual that would paddle with me. He was not he didn't have the history that I had so…

[DUBSIDE]
Before all these solo paddles, you would go out there there was nobody else there out there in a kayak.

[SKIP]
Never. No boat.  It's not a… it’s not really a marine recreational area. Because it's just…You have fishermen but they go farther out offshore.  And it's not a fun place to go and fish, because the swell is so big. If you're out there as a recreational fisherman you're more than likely to get seasick . It was not a big business of doing fishing touring unless they went way offshore.

But I rarely would see any boats on the water of any kind. This is an interesting feature that most people don't think about but Mendocino could be foggy. It was either very gloomy and dark and kind of dismal when you go out, which added to the sort of anxiety of going out in unknown waters and big swell. But it could also be blindingly sunny. Although I loved it, one of the most challenging times of day would be to go out in late afternoon at the early part of sunset, early sunset, late afternoon, which was when most of my, a lot of my opportunities to get on the water were. But the west coast sunset is just blinding. And you look west and it's all just reflected. As you're going out going into the sun, it would conceal like break and other things when you're trying to look west and you can't see, even with good polarized sunglasses, which I, early on in my, I decided that sunglasses were were a curse, an anathema, if you were going out in big seas that they could be a problem for seasickness. So I kind of eschewed sunglasses and brimmed hats. I wore bandanas like you do to keep the sun off the top of my head, but I didn't like things in my field of view in heaving seas.

[DUBSIDE]
Like, like a low sunset like that, a brim, it's reflecting off the water as well as coming straight at you, so it's just, yeah, there's all this glare.

[SKIP]
I didn't mention, but obviously, as soon as you go to Mendocino, you were in helmet country.
[DUBSIDE]
Oh yeah, with the rocks.

[SKIP]
In the San Juans you don't need a helmet, you know, you look a little silly because it's just, it's currents and, and things. Maybe Deception Pass if you're going to get crazy. But Mendocino was helmets always. And so a little bit of a brim on the helmet was the first thing I sort of allowed to use, because you could kind of tip your head. But yeah, the sunshine was kind of crazy, and it made it challenging to paddle out in the afternoon in the blinding sunshine, just because it would conceal what's going on with the water and early warning of stuff.

I just never would see anybody else paddling in all those years. 
The, the exception was in Mendocino, the Bay Area Sea Kayakers are a big group. And they have an annual trip with a big crowd that would show up in October when the seas go dead calm. So it's a very popular time there with people that, from the Bay Area that knew a lot of the easily accessible caves and tunnels, things.

 That's the time to come and bring people that haven't been before, because it's like paddling a lake, and you can just go and easily get in and out of these features without being surprised by swell.

[DUBSIDE]
What's the tide range there?

[SKIP]
It's not big, it's like a six, seven foot tide range, usually. Tides, the coastal currents were a little bit of a thing, but really they, they were such a second or third order effect compared to any of the swell and surge zone effects. The pull and tug of break and stuff in surge zones far exceeded anything that was happening with tidal movements. You'd hit a, you'd hit some funny spots.

[DUBSIDE]
But there'd be, there'd be times when the general water would be too high to go into a certain cave.

[SKIP]
Oh yes, yeah, there could be.

[DUBSIDE]
You had to know when, when you could go into some place.

[SKIP]
Yeah, it would change your headroom, and even if there was a little bit of swell, it was like, that's just going to be a little too tight if a one foot higher wave comes through. 

There were ones that literally the, the approach, you'd come in from within a surge zone, kind of a protected area, and there was a, like a slit in the cliffs that was so narrow you could get your boat in, but you literally, you couldn't paddle.

You had to put your paddle on your deck and kind of narrow, then you push your way along the walls, and then it would open up into this, a big open ceiling, like a blowhole kind of thing that were back in the cliffs. But to get in and out of there, you did have to, it was a little claustrophobic now and then. There were a lot in the Mendocino Islands.

[DUBSIDE]
So in learning all the, the different areas there and all the different little cave passages and things, did you ever get really bashed in the head or a big injury?

[SKIP]
Nothing, nothing in the head. If it had happened at that time, it would have probably been an issue for my neck. But there were a few times on big days where some of the surge zones you'd come to assume were kind of safe areas that no matter what was going on, on the outside of some really large rocks, like the height of those trees, you were in a passage that under 99% of conditions, you'd be fine.

And a couple of times when I was with Jeff, one of the guys that, a very serious paddler and a very skilled instructor that showed up later years in Mendocino, and I, I was coming to that part of the story, but I was with him and one other person and in this narrow passage, it was not a cave, it didn't have a ceiling, but there were a lot of caves this way. And we got completely surprised by probably a rogue wave on a big day, but it completely came up over this huge rock and dumped an enormous amount of water into that channel and just sent us in all directions, and extremely aerated water. The energy was going to push you right into those caves.

And thankfully that's when all the hours and hours of sitting and rolling and just making it like muscle memory is, and in those conditions, it wasn't even a clean roll because the water is so aerated and pulling and pushing that it was a scull roll that saves you. It's like, that's what I, that's what I tell people that what I would take out is it learn, learn the scull roll because.

[DUBSIDE]
The vertical sculling roll is the one, one of those.

[SKIP]
Just anything, anything that you can keep a constant upward rolling movement going when, you know, a single sweep isn't going to, might not get purchase , and then you only have so many tries to set up for that. But if you can scull your way up in turbulent water, that will, that will probably save you someday. 

So I just remember paddling out of that situation. Jeff was waiting at the edge of the channel where we're in better protection. And I just felt like lead, like after I'd rolled all the adrenaline and everything else and paddled maybe 500 feet, maybe, you know, uh, 300 yards to get out of that and met up with him, just felt like lead. Arms and everything else were totally dead. And I just remember him looking at me and going, “Thank you for not having me have to rescue you in that situation. Thanks for being skilled enough for me not to have to rescue you.”

[DUBSIDE]
But, um, yeah, it was, uh, we didn't have, did you get any major boat damage sometimes?

[SKIP]
A few times? Yeah, I was relating this story earlier. I think it was a little bit, we were paddling in a group that was visiting. This is in almost the last year I was in Mendocino. And, I had started looking around at, at some boats by Sterling's Kayaks. I'd had this Diamante that was my workhorse forever, and paddled for you know, a decade and a half. And literally the week that I saw some of his work, and paddled a couple of them and started thinking about upgrading my boat to something from his line, was the same, almost the same day that I crunched my boat and I just mistimed a surge spot and ended up on top of the rocks, and then sliding off the rocks and catching the bow on and going back down into the hole. And then put back up on the rocks. It punched holes in my bow and broke the nose of the kayak, did a lot of damage to the glass underneath me that was kind of hidden damage.

It didn't rupture the hull, but it had broken all of the glass that was fiberglass in there. So that was kind of the end of that boat's life. I repaired it, but it always looked a little Frankensteiny. It's where you get to do your on water repairs with duct tape and a few essentials.

[DUBSIDE]
So wouldn't you consider like a plastic kayak better, better suited for those conditions?

[SKIP]
There's always that, there's that legitimate school of thought. There are a lot of boats that are just made for, if I'm going to trash, do a lot of trashy work on rocks and surge zones, why not just go ahead and paddle a plastic boat. 

But all my trips, I didn't do a lot of sit and play, which I knew guys that were really about let's get on the water, get to some cool spot and just stay there all day working the surge zone or around a rock and surf the spot. We call it “park and play”. 

And they were more like a little more whitewater mentality, and they didn't like the long drudge of a miles day. But when I would go out, I wanted my light boat that I could paddle fast and cover miles and still get in those spots. But you're going to break one once in a while.

[DUBSIDE]
And all this in Mendocino is on the coastline there. There's no, to paddle miles and miles offshore, there's no real reason to do that or place to go or anything.

[SKIP]
No, just covering point to point. It’s a long stretch of coast. And there's a bunch of the, the sequence of these river mouths. The Noyo and Fort Bragg. The Ten Mile River is at the top. Then the Noyo and Fort Bragg. Then you have Rabbit Cove, Jug Handle, Caspar, Russian Gulch, Jack Peter's Gulch, which is just north of the Mendocino headlands, then Big River.

Then there are some lesser ones along the way, then Albion, which is an enormous, the head at Albion is enormous. Then Navarro, the heights start going up. The Navarro river. And then you're starting to get down to Elk. 

If people are listening and haven't ever gone beyond Mendocino, go down to Elk. Elk is a phenomenal place. It's even more three-dimensional than Mendocino. There's just less of it. But it also is lined with caves and tunnels. You approach it from the north. You can go through, like a quarter mile long tunnel that gets you from kind of outside to inside Elk Bay. 

But I just wanted to cover all the, I wanted to experience every bit of those, of that coastline. So I broke it up into these, you know, 10 or 15 mile trips.

[DUBSIDE]
You just recited that off the top of your head with no notes. So I can see you intimately know that whole coastline.

[SKIP]
And there's a lot of little stuff in between there, the lesser, they don't even have a name, but, yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff.

[DUBSIDE]
When I was there, there were some other people there on the shoreline. They weren't fishermen. They weren't boaters. They were diving for abalone. The abalone divers.

[SKIP]
Yes. Abalone divers, as we, insensitively called them. There was, there was usually casualties every year.

[DUBSIDE]
So it's the shell that it's on the bottom somewhere.

[SKIP]
They used to be massive, and you could just back in the early 20th century, you could just walk along at low tide and pry them off any old, any rock. And they were huge.

They have a big shell, but they're more like a clam. But they're one sided. It's not a bivalve. But they have a shell on one side and they just kind of a foot that clamps onto rocks. But as time passed, they become harder and harder to find.

So people would…

[DUBSIDE]
Is that from, from humans?

[SKIP]
Yeah. Just consuming them. And so then it became the trick to, you had to dive to go down in these coves that are full of kelp. So they would be low down at deep levels in the kelp forest. And if you would dive down, there's a tool you could use to kind of pry them off, put them in your bag and you're only supposed to take so many.

[DUBSIDE]
So in order not to wipe them out so much, the restrictions, you cannot scuba dive to get them. You must free dive, hold your breath and go down.

[SKIP]
And you can only take so many and there's only ones of a beyond a certain size. I never did it. I partook of someone else's work a few times, but if it's not cooked absolutely perfectly, it's just rubbery and it's like, I don't know what's the point.

The ones that die naturally would leave beautiful shells. They're like a mother of pearl inside the shell. And some of them were as big as a dinner plate if you knew where to look and were kind of beaches that people weren't walking all the time.

[DUBSIDE]
So the main reason to get them is not to eat the meat, but for the shells.

[SKIP]
I think both. I mean, if you're going to dive for them, you're probably going to eat them and then look for the ones that, oh, I have this 12 inch abalone shell.

[DUBSIDE]
And so that's what ultimately ends up, say, look on guitars and fine inlay work.

[SKIP]
Yeah. And I have some sculptures, stuff that I would kind of inlay with the bits. You could find the stuff we get pulverized in the surf. So a typical beach, a rocky beach in Mendocino, if you scoop up a pile of the black rocky sand that was interspersed with little bits of the abalone. You can kind of filter through that.

But, yeah, you can also find the big shells. We had stacks of them all around the house. It was nifty to use them like a soap dish in the Mendocino household. But some of them were just huge.

[DUBSIDE]
And so the people who are trying to get these things, the casualties occur when they're free diving and they push their limits too hard?

[SKIP]
Yeah, they have they just get trapped in the kelp and panic and get a lungful of water. And that's it. And yeah, there were usually a few every year, in the season when it was allowed. But the ecosystem has changed since I left there. It went through a couple of waves. Like the kelp forest really died back because the urchins. And then the urchins died back. And then that was what the abalone were eating. I believe at this point, the abalone are just not even a feature of the Mendocino coast any longer. Because all the businesses that catered to abalone divers and during the season have all gone away, because there just there were no abalone and people stopped coming.

But the kelp was a big thing that also if you haven't paddled big primeval coastline before. It was a big deal. The bull kelp. So this is bull kelp. They're forests with heads that were generally the size of a softball, but could be six or seven inches across on the really big…

[DUBSIDE]
So it's anchored to the bottom way down deep and it just spreads up to the surface.

[SKIP]
Yes. And then so it would form and they love the surge zones and these inner bays. They were mostly an inshore kind of thing. You'd see them out further out, but as the depth drops off, they're not anchored to anything. But it was a it was a constant feature in the early years and it was very stable. The amount of kelp. 

But there are specialized things you learn to do, because a lot of,  you're surfing into a surge zone coming in from open water with with a wave and you're you're targeting to get inside behind these ledges and rocks. There's like only one or two ways in. You could often end up surfing in and landing in these kelp beds.

[DUBSIDE]
And so now instead of the surface water, you have all this seaweed leaf fronds. All around your kayak really thick.

[SKIP]
Don't think of it as these leafy fronds. Think of it as big, giant rubbery pipes that are lined with very little space between them. So you end up on this like surface of rubbery pipe.

[DUBSIDE]
And not just coming up to the surface, but laying flat on the surface.

[SKIP]
They lay down in big, giant groups like dozens and dozens of them in clusters. So you literally may end up having to drag yourself across to get into a little bit deeper water off this bed of kelp. 

But if you got surprised, it was just one of the fun early things to say, look, here's the skill you need to know. You might go over in a kelp bed and you don't have clear water to set up for a roll or get your paddle where you want it to be is the kelp roll. You can demonstrate it. In the heat of the moment, I never had to do a kelp roll in a real situation.

But you kind of go over and then make sure your paddle is going up vertically and just let it fall over on top of the kelp. Then you've got all the purchase in the world. You can almost just like a poolside roll.

But you just don't want to panic by trying to go through the motions of a normal roll set up and getting your paddle hooked up in the tangle of stuff and then panicking. It's just, OK, I can if I needed to, I could actually probably just roll up on the kelp. It's that thick.

And the funny thing was that over the years you were there toward the end, things became really dynamic. I think as climate change kicked in, there were things were happening fast. And we had this one year where the kelp literally doubled in quantity.

So everywhere you went, it was really kind of not a fun year to paddle because every access point was just choked with kelp. There was nowhere to go to escape the kelp paddling except to just stay offshore. And it really blocked a lot of the areas you would go in to kind of take your choice of cave entrance or a little back channel to go through was just clogged with kelp.

There was nowhere to go that you couldn't, you weren't just paddling in kelp. But then I think it was the year before I left, it kind of cleared up the next year. But then things went the opposite direction.

The kelp beds really died off. And then that caused a lot of urchin stuff. And then that's cascaded to the abalone.

And I think it's come back somewhat. But it was interesting and gratifying to be there long enough to see that these kinds of big dynamics can happen. It really changes the experience of going there and paddling.

I've been blessed with more than one close encounter with whales that were spontaneous and I didn't try to find them.

But one was out here off Neah Bay. There was a really close encounter with a pod. I was alone and just sat among the grays that had tucked in—or the humpbacks, sorry—that had tucked in for a little breather coming in out of the open ocean.

But one of them was paddling from Big River down to Van Damme. And it was a stormy day. It was raining and the wind was out of the north, I had paddled north. I parked at Van Damme, paddled north like three, four miles up to Big River Bay and turned and came back and was just surfing with the wind.

And it was like six foot seas. And I would just surf a wave and go down in the trough and wait for the next wave. The winds had picked up and it was just stormy and I entered a trough. And just as I came down the wave, there was a gray whale fluking like as close as you are to me, just going the other direction. All I saw was the arch of its back and the flukes coming. It was just going the other way.

I'm sure she or he knew that I was there. But you're just, that moment you freeze in time. You're out there all alone and here's this big fluke passing the other way.

And I caught the next wave and I tasted adrenaline for the next three miles. Getting back, finding my way back to Van Damme. It's one of my favorite stories because it was just a miracle moment that you're that close to something like that.

And I didn't plan on it. And no one else was there to enjoy the moment or talk about it. But yeah, it's pretty cool.

[DUBSIDE]
Has anyone made a guidebook for the Mendocino Coast there?

[SKIP]
Like I said, I mentioned, I think the answer is no. No one's ever really, there might be charts and things. But Jeff Laxier built a business there.

He came a year or two before I moved away. And he's extremely skilled. He used to do training with the Navy SEALs.

He was kind of their instructor for doing sea landings and insertions by sea in kayaks and things. He would take them out to do training of troubles at sea, like create situations they had to work through. And he was a well-ranked competitive kayak surfer and whitewater, sorry, surf kayaks.

And he moved up there, I think to move from, he was from SoCal, San Diego. He moved to Mendocino to set up kind of a guide business, both open ocean and some of the rivers offer a lot of nice calm paddling for people to visit. But he made a very successful business with his wife there for years.

But it was really gratifying. He was the first person that, like one-on-one, I took him and showed him everything that I had learned over the years, showed him all the cool stuff. I appreciated that he appreciated it.

He taught me a lot of stuff, even at that stage. I think you met him, we paddled at TAKS that one time. But he was just a great trip leader for taking people out in insane conditions, like 30-foot seas that he did. And just really huge days.

And he'd talk people through that were kind of, decided they weren't confident enough to do this, but made them confident to head out into that stuff. There's some cool YouTube videos of Russian Gulch at about a 30-foot peak on the, at the mouth. It was like a, I think it was like a 16 or 17-foot day, but it was peaking at about 30 feet trying to, at the mouth of Russian Gulch where you're trying to get out.

And there's some good footage of us paddling out into those, into those seas. Probably the only map is in his mind, in my mind, that someone needs to make a book or at least photo document some of this.

I had charts because I had like really early GPS stuff that I could trace. I took, and it was super old technology that it would record my track. I couldn't look at a screen and make it at all useful. So all it would do is record my track. I could download the track, the trace later into Google Earth and then plot my trip on a Google Earth. And I would print a lot of those out.

So you could see places where the GPS would show you like drilling into a, into a cliff and then coming out on the other side and things that would mark a lot of the, where the caves were and tunnels. 

Paddling in stuff like Mendocino, you can't come and go at it. I think that's my concluding remark is that for me, it wasn't a space that you could just kind of come and go or really appreciate if you just showed up one day and wanted to get out on the water with someone that kind of knew it. It was a head space that you kind of developed and then maintained, like the confidence to go out without thinking about it day in and day out. You develop that.

I felt it like I was away when we moved back up here and it was harder to get to the Olympic coast, fewer access points and a longer drive for me. And I'd go back out on the ocean, but I was out of that head space now.  It wasn’t…there was that apprehension now, like, I know this water and I know what it can do.

And so once you’re… you have to be in it like constantly to make it comfortable and always, it's always exciting, but there's just a little more adrenaline factor.

[DUBSIDE]
All right. Well, you can tell us all about San Juan and maybe part two sometime for now.

[SKIP]
It's beautiful here.

[DUBSIDE]
That'll cover it. Mendocino with Skip Pauls.

[SKIP]
Super fun.

[DUBSIDE]
Thank you for being on the Dubcast.

[SKIP]
No, thanks for having me. It was great to see you. I didn't know it would be a feature here, but I really enjoy those years and I'm glad we got to, I took Dubside, we went out and did some solo two-man paddles and I got to show Dubside some of the really cool arches.

And I remember that day, it was like a six or eight foot day. I was confident you could roll.

[DUBSIDE]
So I could do that.

[SKIP]
So we just drill into some of the big surge zones and the big arches and had fun with it. It was really cool.

[DUBSIDE]
Well, thanks.
 
[ANDREW]
After our conversation ended, Skip took us to his favorite place on the island. South Beach stretches long and open, its shoreline scattered with bleached driftwood logs. The shore broke into small coves between rocky points. The beach faced south, open to the Strait, with the Olympics far off and pale with snow.

We longed to stay, but SSTIKS awaited us the next morning. So we said our goodbyes, and turned back toward Friday Harbor to catch the ferry to the mainland, leaving the island behind, but not its impression.

Until next time, thank you for listening to The Dubcast with Dubside