“We’re not going out in those waves, are we?” we ask apprehensively. Two-metre-high breakers roll in and crash ashore near the hotels and tourist shops of downtown Monterey. It’s easy to imagine our kayaks spinning like tops, then emerging as toothpicks in the surf. “Sure we are,” Frank Knight replies confidently. “If you look closely, you’ll see smaller waves mixed in with the big ones. We’ll launch you in a nice calm interval, so you’ll be beyond the swells before the next breaker rolls in.”
Knight, we reasoned, should know what he’s talking about. He was born in nearby Carmel and his father worked as a refrigeration mechanic in Cannery Row,the historic Monterey waterfront that inspired John Steinbeck’s 1945 novel of the same title. The sardine canneries of Steinbeck’s day now house museums, restaurants, and shops, as well as Monterey’s renowned aquarium.
Fifteen years ago, Knight caught the tourism wave and began renting bikes from his home. Now he owns a company, Adventures by the Sea, and his biggest business by far is kayaks. The small boats are perfect for viewing the seabirds, marine mammals and expansive kelp forests of Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Stretching 445 kilometres north from Big Sur, past Monterey to the edge of San Francisco and 48 kilometres out to sea, this is the largest marine sanctuary in the U.S.
We sit in our kayaks as wave after wave pounds the beach in front of us. Then, Knight and one of his guides launch us like stones in a slingshot. We find ourselves smoothly gliding
through the sapphire water, 200 metres off- shore. There are no breakers here, just gently rolling waves.
“This is a rough day,” says Knight when he joins us. “Normally it’s as smooth as glass.”
From the water, the weather-beaten canneries propped up on barnacle-encrusted pylons resemble the backside of a theatre stage set. A backdrop of sandy beaches, rocky cliffs and rolling mountains embraces the bay. It’s hard to believe that we’re in an ecological haven, just two hours south of San Francisco and directly offshore from downtown Monterey, whose population of 33,000 doubles in the summer/fall tourist season.
Travelling over the kelp forest is much like paddling through thick vegetable soup.The voluminous brown seaweed grows up from the bottom, then spreads itself along the surface, supported by air-filled bladders.
“Kelp is the largest algae in the world,” says Knight. He explains that during the summer it can grow up to 25 centimetres a day, reaching heights of more than 30 metres. The kelp is protected here, but farther south, Knight adds, it’s harvested with sea combines. Algin from the kelp is used as a stabilizing and homogenizing agent in ice cream, salad dressings, chocolate milk, toothpaste, shaving cream and dozens of other common products.
Kelp forests, undulating below the surface, also provide food and shelter for the bay’s aquatic inhabitants, notably the sea otters. These endearing, be-whiskered mammals once widely inhabited the northern Pacific Rim. Then, in the early days of international seafaring, fur traders hunted otters nearly to extinction. It wasn’t until hunting was banned in 1911 that populations began to recover. Otters didn’t reappear in Monterey Bay until the 1960s, and the species is still considered threatened. There are only about 2,000 California sea otters compared to an estimated original population of 15,000.
A brown head pops up 20 metres away and surveys us with its teddy bear button eyes.
“They’re very curious animals,” remarks Knight. “I brought someone out last week and an otter clambered aboard his kayak for a closer look.”
A schoolteacher once returned from a kayak tour with an even better story. A sea otter emerged next to her kayak with a waterproof camera tucked under its arm. A couple minutes later, two scuba divers surfaced in a burst of bubbles and told her that the otter had stolen their camera. When she paddled closer to the otter, it swam toward her, threw the camera into the kayak and dashed off.
Another otter bobs up next to our kayaks and nonchalantly floats on his back munching an abalone the size of a small pizza. The crunching of his teeth on the shell sounds like he’s cracking nuts.
Unlike whales and seals, which have a layer of blubber to keep them warm in the cold ocean, sea otters rely on their fur coats. While humans have about 100,000 hairs on their heads, sea otters have up to a mil- lion hairs per square inch of surface area. The hair is so thick that the water never comes in contact with their skin.
The fur’s insulating property is lost if it’s matted by oil, making otters especially vulnerable to oil spills. The 1989 Exxon Valdez spill killed nearly 5,000 otters in Alaska. Tankers routinely ply the waters offshore of Monterey, and U.S. risk assessment experts estimate that six large oil spills will occur over the next 30 years. Environmental groups are fighting to limit oil transport and exploration near the coast.
Closer to home, paddlers do what they can to pro- tect the fragile ecology of the area. Knight frequently donates his staff, kayaks and time to pick up any trash that floats into the bay.
“We pick up soft drink cans, beer bottles and plastic bags that blow in from fishing boats,” he says.“A sea turtle will die if it eats a plastic bag. If the bag gets caught in its stomach, it will starve.”
As we watch an otter wolf down $50 worth of abalone, then dive down to his kelp forest grocery store to retrieve more food, Knight explains that the animals’ high rate of metabolism also helps to keep them warm.
“They stoke the furnace all the time by eating up to a quarter of their body weight each day to maintain their temperature,” Knight says. That’s equivalent to an average-weight human eating 120 hamburgers.
This means that each otter is devouring up to five kilos of crabs, clams, mussels, snails and abalone every day—much to the chagrin of local fishermen.The otters are actually doing the fishermen a service, however. By feasting on sea urchins, which destroy kelp forests if left unchecked, otters keep the kelp ecosystem in balance.
“Did you notice that the abalone shell was broken on one side?” asks Knight.“That’s because the otter used a tool to dislodge it from a rock.” Otters carry their tools under their arm-flaps and pull them out when needed to crack open clam shells, or even to bash open a sunken aluminum can to remove an octopus that’s taken refuge inside.
While most otters use rocks as tools, Knight remembers one who used the thick base of an old Coke bottle. Sometimes, an otter will use a rock or concrete slab on its belly as an anvil to hammer open a shellfish. It eats the meal using its midriff as a table, turning its torso over in the water to clear away the crumbs.
Mother otters also use their stomachs as portable playpens for their furry pups. Sculling along on their backs, they deposit their youngsters on the kelp bed canopy before diving for food. Securely wrapped in the kelp blanket nursery, the helpless pups won’t be washed ashore by the surf.
We, too, anchor ourselves by grasping the kelp strands to keep our kayaks from drifting ashore while we observe the animals. Another otter surfaces with a crab, disassembling and eating one leg at a time before twirling the body like a jelly donut to gnaw at the edges.
A couple of seagulls descend on his belly to snatch away some tasty tidbits. We see other birds as well—web-footed auks, pterodactyl-like pelicans, and black cormorants that stand on the rocks with their wings spread out to dry. The cormorants dive as deep as 18 metres, but they lack oil in their plumage so their feathers absorb water. Sometimes the birds are too heavy to fly until they dry off.
There’s so much life in the bay, we forget that we’re still within sight of Monterey’s built-up coastline. Seals and sea lions also compete for our attention. There’s a year-round colony of about 85 sea lions on the rocks by the shore. Because it’s windy, they’re out in the water instead of sunning on the rocks. Knight explains how we can tell the difference between a harbour seal and a California sea lion.
“The seals have a very hydrodynamic profile, since they don’t have an external ear, while the sea lions have ears as well as bulbous foreheads. ”The sea lions are also much larger, weighing up to 400 kilos compared to the seals, which weigh less than 140.
A harbour seal playfully pokes his head up next to our kayaks. By the time we focus our cameras, he’s disappeared. We wait in vain for him to resurface, only to discover him watching us from the opposite side of the boat. Other seals escort us back to Cannery Row, where Knight guides us in so that we’re riding the smooth water behind a breaker.
We slip ashore amidst the bustle of tourists on the Monterey waterfront.We’ve seen so much on our two-hour paddle, we think maybe the other tourists are missing the boat, so to speak. For us, the heart of Monterey is in the Bay.
Barb and Ron Kroll have recorded and photographed wildlife from water level in destinations ranging from the Amazon and the Arctic to Africa and Asia.
This article first appeared in the Winter 2002 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.
