Thursday, July 29th, 2010--trip to Channel Islands

Today we woke up early and made a short drive to the Ventura Harbor to catch our shuttle boat to the Channel Islands for two nights of camping courtesy Island Packers. The boat was medium sized boat, our gear stashed below. From the deck as we pulled out of the Harbor we saw a buoy with sea lions stacked one atop the other. As the shoreline pulled away and we came to mid-channel, we were accompanied by a huge congregation of common dolphins and bottlenosed dolphins. They dipped on all sides of the boats, but especially seemed to enjoy swimming just in front of the boat, some of which were mother and child dolphin pairs swimming in tandem. We also passed several oil drilling rigs in mid-channel. There are several Channel Island, we passed one on our left--a narrow island with a distintive arch at its central point. Santa Cruz island, where we stayed, was a long island--100 square miles or so, with 2/3 of the island set aside for the the nature conservancy. When we arrived, fire drilling our gear from the boat, we hiked about a mile to our campsite--at the very far end of the camping area, a pleasant almost level hike.

Our campsite abutted a meadow, populated by large, fragrant eucalyptus trees. Soon we noticed some visitors--an endemic species of fox--smallish with pointed snouts and mongoose like behaviour. They appeared to be very cute, but we had been forewarned that they were quite capable scavengers. We arrived just after 11 am, and hiked up the crest of the valley--a dry and brush valley, from the top of which we could see 500 feet straight down --the island had few beaches, but many dramatic cliffs. Peter and Patrick were warned not to throw rocks since many kayakers and divers circled the island. Smuggler's Cove was the name of the trail. After returned from our hike, we explored the dry creek bed near our tent and made a suprising find: a cormorant waddling around the stones, appearing a little disoriented and weak. We couldn't quite tell its age, but it seemed young. It hid in the shade next to the creek, about a mile from the ocean. Alice Peter and Patrick brought water to it, and it appeared to want to drink it. They dropped water onto its head and feet--setting out a metal pan for it to stand in, which it did for several minutes.

After some deliberation, we decided to take the cormorant back to the water, figuring that perhaps it was a lost young bird, and that the foxes would have their way with it in short order if we didn't--in fact we already saw some lurking in the bushes. We noticed that the bird followed us around when we put it on the ground, so we supposed that it liked us; however we doubted that it could make the 1 mile hike on its own. Alice first tried carrying it in the yellow camping blanket, but quickly noted that tens of small lice quickly made jumped from the bird to the towel, making a quick and queasy migration. Eventually we settled on grabbing the bird with a ziplock bag, and stealthily walked past the other campers and rangers, not knowing what they would think. When we dropped it back in the water, it dabbled around in the shallows, then took off to deeper waters, and we hope, was reunited with it cormorant clan hanging out a few hundred yards offshore on some rocky outcroppings.

While we were at the beach, we managed to strike up a conversation with a kayak guide and arranged to tentatively take a guided tour the following day. We went back to the camp for a dinner with some of our freeze dried foods--beef stroganoff, past due and not so good, mexican rice really good. We enjoyed our first wilderness night in the cool ocean air, but clear skies. We continued with our concentrated reading of the hobbit after putting all of our foodstuff securely away, on our own great adventure!