Moss Landing

Best known, perhaps, for its nuclear power plant, Moss Landing  might seem like an odd choice for a two-night vacation stop-over, but it served us well. It’s located roughly half way around the curve of Monterey Bay, midway between Santa Cruz and Monterey itself. The estuarian waters of Elkhorn Slough enter the bay nearby, and the Nature Conservancy owns the nice chunk of hills and woods and fields it flows through before it arrives. Sea Harvest Fish Market and Restaurant sits on a pier at the mouth of the slough, with Monterey Kayak Rentals at the far end of the same parking lot. On a gray day, you can visit the Santa Cruz Marine Biology Research Center on the west side of town. It’s not the Monterey Aquarium, but it’s nearby, and it’s free.

But what kind of a “town” is Moss Landing? The old river bed of the Salina River slices through it lengthwise, parallel to the ever-busy two-lane Highway 101 that runs along the landward edge. There’s a peculiar “main drag” with a colorful—and popular— Mexican restaurant, and a Shakespeare Museum—closed— that seems to have been lifted from Dodge City, Kansas. There’s a port lined with muscular pleasure craft and utilitarian vessels seemingly over-equipped with heavy duty fishing rigs and antennae, and to the north and west, a warren of pole barns and dusty sheet metal warehouses. The Pacific Ocean is invariably just a few feet away, a three-minute drive down the street or a short climb over the grassy dunes.  

We booked a room at the Captain’s Inn for two nights on the strength of a few pictures on Air BnB. You couldn’t see the ocean, but the rooms looked out over the old riverbed, where we had hopes lots of shorebirds might congregate. But two days? Well, we wanted to explore the Nature Conservancy property, which we’d been to twice before, but both times in a rush, an hour before closing. And we wanted to kayak up the slough, which is often teeming with sea otters and harbor seals, to get a view of the same heavenly terrain from a different angle.

Hilary was especially keen to do the kayaking. I was also in favor … but only if conditions were right. So our first stop was to the kayak rental. The man behind the counter—he had an English accent—led us over to a large and attractive screen where we could see the predicted wind and tides for the next few days in a panorama of overlapping blue digital waves.

He pointed. “Tomorrow morning at 9 or 9:30 would be perfect,” he said. “You see. The tide will just be coming out, so you’ll be fighting that a little…” At this point I felt it appropriate to interject that we’d canoes for miles in fierce wind In the North Woods on the Canadian border and against the current of the Mississippi. “Good. The wind will be light, you won’t have any difficulty, and once you’re ready to turn around, you can drift all the way back.”

He seemed far less concerned that we’d be carried out to sea by the tide (it does happen) than that we’d get too close to the otters and seals. Also a good sign.

We spent the afternoon at the Nature Conservancy property. The main trail through the fields leads down the hill to the estuary, where there are usually plenty of shore birds feeding. It’s a three-mile loop, and you’re likely to see some interesting things in the woods, too. As we were starting out from the visitors’ center we met up with an elderly couple who live nearby. They told us they’d recently seen a great-horned owl drinking water out of the dog dish outside their back door on more than one occasion!

I won’t bore you with the details of our walk, but for the birders in the crowd, here’s a smattering of what we saw: Brewer's Blackbird, Least Sandpiper, Lesser Yellowlegs, Long-billed Dowitcher, Marbled Godwit, Long-billed Curlew, Oak Titmouse, Common Raven, Black Phoebe, Acorn Woodpecker, White-tailed Kite.

The next morning we arrived at the kayak rental in plenty of time to be convinced we ought to wear the plastic pants they provide for their guests. It was a good idea. We paddled in an open plastic two-person vessel past the seafood restaurant, turned east, and headed up the slough, entering a realm of solitude and silence populated by long, sausage-like creatures—seals and otters—that we were mildly fascinated by but had been instructed to avoid.

There were quite a few exotic birds, too: Pacific Loon, Western Grebe, Eared Grebe, Forster's Tern, Common Murre, Black-bellied Plover, Common Yellowthroat, White-crowned Sparrow. The individual species meant less, however, than the exhilaration of a bright warm morning in March, low to the water on a red plastic kayak, paddling against a gentle tide.

We’d brought neither cameras nor binoculars. Too risky. And the fact that we’d seen so many birds from land the previous day made it an easy call. Just breathe the air, soak in the surroundings, keep paddling. Or drift.

We are lunch for a second time at the Sea Harvest, why not? But now, looking out over the rail at the entrance to the slough, we knew a little more about what lay beyond.