La Jolla Kayak Tours

A beautiful, sunny, blue-skied, bird-chirping, crisp-wave day. I was about to embark on my first real activity other than hiking and going to work since I moved to La Jolla in September. A taste of what the world could be (again). Before booking a tour with La Jolla Kayak tours, I checked the high tide schedule for La Jolla Cove. 9:25am. I figured since this was a sea cave tour, high tide would be the best time to go. Otherwise, it would be impossible to actually go into the caves without water in them. I booked the tour for the 10:00am slot, the first tour of the day. At 9:20am, I found one of the last available parking spot at the La Jolla Shores Beach Park (the closest parking spot without a 2 hr limit), and booked it to the place they said to meet at 9:30am. A sign on the door told me WRONG - go down the street to another place. Once there, they gave us wet suits and told us that the changing rooms were closed. Should we… put the wet suits over our clothes? Should I strip naked in the lobby? I had worn clothes that I thought would be reasonable to kayak in, not knowing the wet suit requirement. Finally, I decided to take off everything except my underwear and shimmy into the springsuit wetsuit (aka shorty, aka a wetsuit with just shorts and short sleeves - not full coverage). (I think they assume everyone knows that with a wet suit, you typically wear nothing or only a bathing suit underneath. If I hadn’t snorkeled in a wet suit in Ecuador last year, I would have had no idea.) I put on my helmet, gathered my waterproof cell phone bag with my mask, car key, ID, and credit card (they did offer lockers), and joined the rest of the crew outside… none of whom, it turned out, were wearing wetsuits. Wait, this was optional? After a few more minutes of waiting for some folks to show, we finally got down to the beach and pushed out about 40 minutes past our launch time. There were roughly ~10 kayaks in our group, some tandems, some singles (with people in them, not just lone kayaks).

I just want to say one of the coolest things upfront: when you are out on the water in La Jolla Cove, and look back to the cliffs, that you can actually see exactly where one tectonic plate is sliding underneath another tectonic plate. I am so skeptical of this because it sounds so crazy, but if our guides say it, it must be true? You can see how one of the cliff’s layers swoops downward underneath one that has horizontal layers. Nutty!

Note: most of the pictures below were taken through a layer of wet plastic:

A thing I’m learning quickly about California is that at some point when I wasn’t looking, Brazilian swimwear made it up to North America. Ass totally out I reckon is now the norm? Or if not the norm, at least acceptable. You can like, wear your ass-out bathing suit and stroll into the local convenient store next to the beach as long as you have shoes on? It’s a new, golden era.

There were tons of other kayak companies around that somehow didn’t come up in my Google search. I was actually surprised by how many people were launching boats, bumping elbows trying to get all the kayaks in and out of the ocean. Our guides were chatting it up and joking around with other guides. It also appeared we had some of the only women guides (at least at the time), Maddy (sp?) and Megan (sp?), both of whom, but especially Megan, made me laugh out loud.

The only time I had ever sea-kayaked before was in very calm waters in an inlet on the Kattegat Sea south of Gothenburg in Sweden. This was not that. There were what looked like monster waves to me (although to the surfers there, probably barely anything). As I was waiting to launch, I noticed tandem after tandem wipe out when trying to move past the waves lapping up on the shore. I was getting a little nervous. I had a single kayak. A Very Nice Man who worked for La Jolla Kayak pushed me out into the ocean as far as we both could go (well, as far as he could go), and he told me to stay straight into the waves and paddle hard. Somehow, I went up and over one, safe, up and over another, safe, then the waves spaced out and things became a little calmer.

There’s a phenomenon that happens with some regularity in my life, in which I am the first person to arrive at a destination, and so I set up shop in where I consider is a reasonable place. Then I wait and assume others will join me. Then the next person comes in and decides to set up shop somewhere else. Then the next person joins them, the next person joins them, and so on. So then by the end, all the group has congregated around the other person and I begrudgingly have to move after someone asks me “Hey, why aren’t you with the group?” Today, I was the first one out and was told that I would need to be the decider of where we congregated out in the water. I found a reasonably good, calm spot in exactly the area I was told, but then other kayakers decided to congregate further away. Cue to me having to paddle over to them and the guides.

Anyway, once we were out on the water past the shore the tour began. We paddled over ~1 mile out to the cliffs, where we learned about how all houses built along the shoreline are considered condemned (even though people still live there). The shoreline is so sandy, that it crumbles just when you touch it, and homes are very prone to sliding down into the sea. Since La Jolla Cove is a protected marine reserve, and no roads go down to the shoreline (since they can’t be built on such sandy soil), homeowners have to pay a ton of money to assess whether the home that fell off the cliff has damaged the marine reserve in some way. Also, all homeowners are required to have $2 million dollars in their bank accounts and none of their homes are insured. But, as the guides were telling us this, we could see new homes being built. As Megan said, “some people have a lot of dollars but no sense.”

Doomed $10 million homes along the seashore.

It was a beautiful view of the cliffs with hundreds (perhaps thousands) of cormorants among them, along with seagulls and pelicans. Unfortunately, we did not go into the seacaves. As it turned out, the caves were not a part of this tour, high tide be darned. Further, because the tide was so high, we weren’t able to see any of the kelp forests. My clever plan had backfired. Another sign from the universe telling me that I should stop trying to prepare so much? That foresight is dumb? Good lesson, universe. I’ll try that next time and let you all know how it goes.

Some other cool cormorant facts (that I still need to fact-check): apparently they dive on one side of their face so furiously to catch fish that over time, they become blind in one eye. Then they start favoring the other side of their face, so they eventually become blind in both eyes. Then they hang out at the cliffs waiting to die. They can apparently dive like 150 feet into the water? And their bones are really dense so it’s hard for them to take off in flight. Pelicans, on the other hand, fly up to 25 mph into the water but only go about 2 feet deep to catch fish. Maddie claimed that this was the case, but Megan wasn’t buying it. On our paddle back to shore, we passed another guide. The conversation went something like:

Megan: “Hey man, how deep can pelicans dive?”

Other guide: “Hella deep.”

Megan: “Nuh-uh!”

So, the jury is still out on that one.

So, we did see a ton of cool cormorants, learned about the diving board that used to jut out over the ocean (no longer present, probably the removal of which has saved many lives). Also apparently sea lions were introduced to La Jolla quite recently to try to control the urchin population, which (of course) did not work, and now instead they eat a lot of native fish that are dwindling dangerously in numbers. Turns out the sea lions are a kind of pests, but they have cute babies, so they’re here to stay.

The coolest part of the trip was on the way back. All of a sudden, probably 20-30 feet away, 2 dolphins poked their heads out and we could see almost their whole bodies glide into and out of the water. I heard a stand-up-paddleboarder say, “Those were the teenagers, the whole family is up on ahead a little bit and they’re kind of straggling and doing their own thing.”

Then, oh god, getting back into shore. They told us if we got caught on a wave, to just paddle as fast as we could straight toward the shore, and lean back and make our bodies as flat as possible. Right when I went in, I somehow was on the crest of the biggest wave. My strength was no match for it. I went way up then was slammed down, getting totally drenched. The boat veered sideways but didn't flip. I rode the wave as it took me to shore, but then another one came right after and the same thing happened again. There was no way I could have kept the boat straight, and it pushed my 30-40 feet up the shore away from the other boats. I was shaking with adrenaline. Is that what surfing is like? It’s kind of terrifying. I pulled my boat up to the shore, happy to have been wearing the springsuit.

One thing you don’t want to see after having spent hours in the water is this sign:

Something our guides said nothing about. Is this also supposed to be common knowledge? Of course, tons of people swim, kayak, stand-up-paddleboard, surf, and fish in La Jolla Cove. The marine reserve that we kayaked atop of is apparently the 2nd most biodiversity reserve on the West coast (the first being Monterrey Bay). Pretty startling that the levels of “bad” bacteria are so high, that is advised to not swim IN A RESERVE.

This is important and worthy of further exploration, so until next time!, when I write more about the actual reserve and the bacterial issues here.

And, for those curious, here is more information about La Jolla Kayaking Tours: https://www.lajollakayak.com

Specifically, I booked the “Original Kayak Tour.” Don’t let the picture of going inside the caves deceive you like they did me :(