Kayaking Tomales Bay at dusk

(See also: my planning notes.)

On October 14–15, 2026, I went back to Tomales Bay with a group of friends for another overnight paddle. Unlike on my previous trips, this time we only had a single car. No matter: the six rachet straps I'd brought held them all on.

I was driving a Hyundai Santa Fe, which nominally has room for seven people. With five of us plus gear, the car was pretty packed! I'm glad I opted for the larger vehicle. Despite all the gear, we were still able to get everything on the kayaks with minimal trouble. This was aided by having 100' of paracord and a bunch of 55 gallon garbage bags to keep the stuff dry, as well as the legs of the folks in the open-deck kayaks.

We got on the water from Miller Boat Launch at about 18:37.

With almost no wind, the Bay was the smoothest I've seen it yet. Given the late hour, I tried to take the most direct route possible to Tomales Beach - the leftmost of the three obvious points visible by grassy upper expanses running towards what looks like cliffs.

We made shore on the other side at our camp at 19:33, for a crossing time of about an hour. The tide was very low, reflective of the 4' delta we expected.

We started a fire, had a dinner of freeze-dried food and fresh salad, roasted some s'mores and got creeped out by a screech owl that flew over the fire, landed on a nearby tree, and continued to scream at us intermittently.

Definitely a screeh owl.

After the fire we got back on the water and paddled for another two hours heading north to Hog Island. The bioluminescence was visible right away, but got super good in random patches. On the western side of Hog Island, hidden from the shore lights, fish darted below the water and the whole surface glowed with strange white light. Paddle strokes left deep blue clouds while the surface wake was a lighter blue filled with starbursts of yellow-white light that continued to scintillate for several seconds afterwards, like fading fireworks. Someone saw a leopard shark swim by leaving a glowing trail many feet long. Hog Island was also covered with cormorants making sounds like sinister seals. Pretty creepy for a bit as we scanned the beach with headlamps trying to find the seals and seeing nothing but shadows and darkness. From Hog Island we went over to White Gulch for more darkness, ending up off course because I mistook a sailboat parked in the middle of the cove for a tent on its shore. More of the party plankton awaited.

On a prior trip large beds of floating seaweed/kelp were a biolum highlight, and I missed them, but I'd never seen the fireworks biolum or a school of fish before. Every time is different.

We got back around 2am by which point it was quite cold, but warm sleeping bags awaited.

The next morning the bay was still and blue, and an egret was fishing in the shallows.

The paddle back didn't have too much wind and we got some close up views of sea otters!

I took the following timing notes for the second day: