China Camp, Point Reyes
Janet: After anchoring for the night at the mouth of the Petaluma River (38º06'42"), off we went toward China Camp. We transferred our things to the catamaran for the shallow-water landing and sadly said goodbye to Captain John and David Martin.

On the ride up onto the beach, I felt like Columbus coming ashore in the New World. China Camp beach is exactly on our latitude line (38º00'03"N). We checked out the shrimp camp museum while we waited for Ryan to show up.

China Camp’s oldest resident, Frank Quan, told us that in the late 19th century about 500 Chinese people, including his family, had lived at this shrimp camp, one of many around the Bay. Two million pounds of shrimp were harvested each year until the Chinese bag nets were banned as a shrimping technique. Frank still fishes in the Bay, but the native shrimp population is almost gone. He explained that shrimp go up to the mixing zone to find less salty water, but with water diversions from the Delta there is less dilution within the Bay. Frank does not expect the shrimp to last through his lifetime.

We spent the night with friends in San Anselmo, then continued by bicycle to the Point Reyes National Seashore headquarters at Bear Valley. Don Neubacher, the park superintendent, had attended the graduate School of Ecology at U.C. Davis with two of the founders of the Mono Lake Committee. He spread a map on a picnic table outside the park office and told us about the many projects they are working on to restore coastal marshes and reopen miles of streams to fish passage, the single biggest effort being the 560-acre Giacomini Marsh at the south end of Tomales Bay.

“It had been a dairy,” Don said, “and they diked off the bay in the 1940s. Lagunitas Creek flows through there and is the one creek in this region that still has a pretty good run of coho salmon. You’ll see three-foot fish in 12 inches of water.”

Don told us that the Giacomini project alone adds ten percent to Central Coast wetlands. “That gives you an idea how little there is left,” he said. “On October 25th we’ll open the last bit of levee, and 50 to 60 percent of the land will flood at high tide. This thing will be transformed in a couple of years.” [On October 26, 2008, 500 people celebrated the opening of the levee and watched the first high tide move across the land.]

That afternoon we bicycled over the ridge to Limantour Beach. Studying the surf swells rolling in and seeing how far away Point Reyes was, we decided to change our plan to kayak from that beach the next morning. Camping that night in a volunteers’ campground not far from the headquarters, we heard the screechy calls of spotted owls. (See “A Glimpse of the Work Required.”)