Off the BEATEN COAST

SANTA CRUZ ISLAND, Calif. — A few weeks ago, about the time I realized that another summer was slipping away under-exploited, I looked west and decided to take steps. I concocted a mission and assembled a crack team of six neo-quasi-semi-adventurers, including my wife and myself. We would camp on an island, peek at a few sea caves from kayaks and explore California’s least visited national park.

All of these were firsts for most of us. Hence, to paraphrase Nixon spokesman Ron Nessen circa 1973, mistakes were made. Before we were back from Santa Cruz Island, now in its first summer of operation as a public campground in Channel Islands National Park, there were misplaced supplies, a shattered lantern, an epidemic of sunburned ankles, a shortage of alcohol. A misadventure in a cave scraped and bruised one of us and gave us all a fresh appreciation of the peril that waits in dark, rocky passages.

Also, in a less dangerous but nevertheless vexing development, there were far too many bananas.

But in our three days and two nights on the island, 20 miles off the coast of Ventura, we also spent quality time in the company of harbor seals, sea cucumbers, semi-wild horses and semi-wild sheep.

We sang, loudly and badly, around a campfire. We slept in a eucalyptus grove beneath a star-bright sky. We hiked 3.5 miles in appalling heat from Scorpion Anchorage to Smugglers’ Cove, tiptoed into the cove’s rock-strewn waters, then straggled back up the steep hills, across the amber waves of grain, above a horizon of blue Pacific.

Altogether, including equipment rentals, camp grub, the two Ventura budget motel rooms we rented the night before embarkation, a pre-trip breakfast and a post-trip dinner, this voyage cost us less than $250 per person.

On the strength of that, along with sea, sky and semi-wild horses, I’m ready to declare the summer unsquandered, the mission a success.

In large part, this is the story of the instruments that made it possible, from the eight collapsible bags of water (eastern Santa Cruz Island has no potable water source) to the first-aid kit.

But this is also the story of Joe. I think every traveler has encountered versions of Joe, unheralded secular angels who turn up here and there, give more than they get, never quite disclose a full identity, slip away without notice and generally keep the world spinning. We never got his last name, but he carried a spear gun, wore a shirt advertising a San Luis Obispo surf shop and seemed to materialize whenever our welfare was in jeopardy. Which, to paraphrase those recently in charge of fund-raising for the Democratic National Committee, regrettably occurred on multiple occasions.

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But that’s taking matters out of order.

First we chose an island. Though the National Park Service allows up to 30 people per night to camp on Anacapa, Santa Barbara and San Miguel islands, and up to 50 on Santa Rosa, the east end of Santa Cruz is among the closest landing sites to the mainland and gets summer boat service four days a week from Ventura and two days a week from Oxnard. With 35 campsites (served by two outhouses) and a 210-person overnight limit on its nearly 10 square miles, the east end of Santa Cruz also has the largest camping capacity of the islands. (The western 90% of Santa Cruz Island is controlled by the nonprofit Nature Conservancy, which closely restricts access.)

Furthermore, when the park service took over the island’s eastern end from its holdout owner and his concessionaires in February, the camping fee dropped from $25 to nothing. (Visits are up substantially since then.)

So we called the park service for our free permit, drove to Ventura, spent the night in the tidy, genial Travelers Beach Inn ($45 to $55 per night) on Thompson Boulevard, rose early and headed for the waterfront.

Island Packers, a park concessionaire based next to the park’s waterfront visitor center, begins its two-hour, 20-mile journey to the island about 8 a.m. Its boat lingers at the island while up to 100 day-trippers explore the place, then returns to the mainland at about 5 p.m. At about 10 a.m. on a Friday, we hopped from the ship into a six-passenger skiff and came ashore beneath the cliffs of Santa Cruz.

Now, imagine the highest hills of central California, around Paso Robles, have been isolated by a flood. Or that someone forgot to grade, irrigate and otherwise exploit a dry patch of Southern California coastline for the last 100 years. That’s Santa Cruz Island. The slopes are covered by a blanket of nonnative grasses and crisscrossed with paths beaten by at least 1,500 sheep, all targeted for deportation in the park service’s effort to eradicate nonnative species. The canyons are stubbled with nonnative eucalyptus trees, the meadows occasionally interrupted by piles of stones that were cleared from the fields by farm workers 100 years ago. In spring there are wildflowers.

A handful of old ranch buildings from the 1880s remain, as do several Chumash camp and burial sites (which the park service protects by excluding from maps and signs). There’s also a fair amount of rusty junk around the campsite--leftovers that the park service says it will eventually take off the island.

Meanwhile, a dozen horses, descendants of the island’s old ranch animals, roam the place as if they own it. Mornings, they often approach the campground to gobble carrots from the hands of campers who violate the park’s no-feeding rule. One evening at dusk, a rumble and clatter interrupted our fireside chatter, and half a dozen of the horses dashed through the middle of the campground. It was thrilling, but the horses are as nonnative as the sheep and the grasses, and they may eventually be removed from the island. For now their fate is tied up in a court squabble involving the park service and Francis Gherini, former co-owner of the island’s east end.

Aside from the horses, sheep and marine animals, the other top-billed animals on Santa Cruz are the island fox, a native island species about the size of a house cat, and the wild boar (about 200 of them)--yet another nonnative species that, like the sheep, was a target of hunting expeditions before the park service’s takeover. We saw none of either animal, but when you have echoing bleats and whinnies by moonlight, it’s hard to feel cheated.

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For most visitors, I suspect, the point of visiting Santa Cruz Island is to explore by sea, not by land. Along with about 75 passengers and a few tons of gear, the Island Packers boat hauled more than a dozen kayaks, countless snorkels and masks and more than a few diving tanks.

Six of the kayaks were ours (rented), and since our only previous kayaking experience had been in calm waters, we also hired a guide to join us on our first day.

For most of that first afternoon, guide Warren Glaser of Ventura-based OAARS (Outdoor and Aquatic Recreation Specialists) badgered, flattered, harangued and educated us. He began by handing around a photo of himself with his head sliced open.

This, he explained, was the work of several sharp rocks and an unexpected surge that nearly killed him while he was swimming in an island sea cave several years ago. Then he led us to deep water, drilled us on technique and judgment, and led us through our first sea cave, which was shaped precisely like the silhouette of cartoon character Marge Simpson.

The rest of the afternoon was full of exhilarating discoveries and confidence-building, pelicans above, anemones and starfish below.

Until the cave called Flatliner, a long dark passage with a low ceiling.

The idea was to paddle in, turn around in a wide stretch, then paddle out. In paddled my buddy Mike, a natural athlete who at 5 feet, 6 inches would seem to have a built-in advantage in such a cave. But just as he reached the darkest stretch, a rogue swell raced in behind him, surprising our guide and everyone else. Then we heard a sort of clatter, and a few seconds passed, and then a kayak drained out of the hole in the rocks, with a bedraggled, bleeding Mike in the water, clinging to it.

The swell had dumped him underwater, and when he tried to reach the surface, the kayak was between him and the air. After an agonizing moment, accompanied by scraping and bruising on the rocks, he fought his way up and slipped out of the cave. The rest of us let Flatliner be, and though Mike shook it off and paddled with us the rest of that day, he was a notably more cautious, quieter kayaker after that.

The only other problem out in the water was the sun. Though we’d basically bathed ourselves in sun block of various potencies, several of us neglected the tops of our feet and ankles, where most water footwear ends. Odd and itchy pink patterns ensued--but they didn’t keep most of us from taking to our kayaks each of the next two days.

The days were both lazy and exhausting--a casual triathlon of hiking, snorkeling and kayaking. Late each afternoon, we searched out dead wood for the campfire (for as long as the supply in the campground area lasts, the park service is allowing this) and attacked the large branches with a small hatchet.

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We were doing so one night when the angel Joe first appeared unto us. He helped us with the chopping, then stepped away briefly and returned with a friend and a far more efficient saw. As he sliced, he told us where the best snorkeling was and warned us to steer clear of the evil campers a few sites away (who soon ran afoul of the rangers, making excessive noise and generally aggravating their neighbors). The evil campers aside, Joe seemed to have an encouraging word for everyone. We wondered what he was selling.

After a day of climbing, paddling and swimming, dinner at 5:30 seemed an excellent idea. It seemed especially so on that long day of arrival. Unfortunately, the Island Packers unloading process is an imperfect animal, our preparations for it were poor, and that combination turned our dinner into a tardy and somewhat desperate exercise.

To empty its ship upon landing, the Island Packers crew shuttles goods and people on two skiffs and assembles its passengers into a sort of bucket brigade from skiff to beach. Just about every bit of gear, from coolers to sleeping bags, is passed hand to hand and deposited in a jumble on the beach. Thus, by the trip’s end, at least 50 strangers had handled most of everyone’s items three times. This included one of my rented lanterns, which shattered somewhere along the line, costing me $11.25.

Once the cargo is all unloaded onto the island beach, everyone grabs for his or her own stuff, then trudges the roughly 500 yards to the Scorpion Ranch campground. We had neither marked our gear clearly nor counted how many pieces we had, so we found ourselves padding back to the beach, and then from campsite to campsite, hunting down items that had been left behind or mistakenly claimed by others and then returned to the beach. One bag of bread, fruit and vegetables, in fact, didn’t turn up until we’d been on the island for about 18 hours. Joe’s people finally found it.

Our first dinner was spaghetti; the second, chili and leftover spaghetti. Breakfast was dominated by oatmeal and Pop-Tarts, lunch by sandwiches. And every meal included a few bananas; yet the steadily darkening, softening pile never seemed any smaller.

None of the meals included beer because I had for some reason assumed (erroneously) that alcohol would be forbidden.

But we did have wine on Saturday night. It was an evening of particular thirst, prompting my wife, Mary Frances, to approach the neighboring campsite, where Joe and his party of 20 had stockpiled about 45 wine bottles to lubricate for their two-night stay.

Might it be possible, Mary Frances asked, for us to buy one of their bottles?

Joe would have none of it. Instead he stood at the head of our picnic table a few minutes later, insisting on a gift of a respectable red, chatting us up like a seasoned sommelier, then expertly extracting the cork and leaving us to it. We drank it, lazed around the campfire for a few hours, then shuffled into our tents about 11 o’clock.

At around that time, Joe and some of his troops, not wanting to wake us, set out on an expedition to lie on the beach, stare up at the shooting stars, and pass a tequila bottle. As they took in the scene, however, Joe noticed the tide was rising beyond the point that some of us had imagined was a high-water mark.

A handful of beached kayaks--our kayaks, though Joe didn’t know it--were just about to float away into the night. Joe hotfooted it over to them and dragged them farther up, out of harm’s way. Then he went back to the star-gazing and tequila. We learned about this, to our great chagrin and wonder, the next morning.

The last time we saw our guardian angel was Sunday afternoon. First, not knowing we were leaving that day, Joe came over to report on his spearfishing adventures, voice concern about our government’s rate of military spending (not, as I say, your garden-variety angel) and offer us a leftover case of wine.

A little bit later, after we’d declined the wine with thanks and joined the day’s departing campers in the march to reload the boat, we needed a stranger to snap a group picture. Up stepped Joe. As I waded out to board the skiff and leave Santa Cruz Island behind, he was still suavely sidling from group to group, working the beach.

I haven’t figured out when we’ll get back to that island, or where we’re taking our next camping trip, but this much I know: There will be more beer and fewer bananas. The gear will be marked and maybe numbered. And Joe, wherever you are, you’re invited.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

GUIDEBOOK: Santa Cruz Idyll

Getting there: Island Packers (1867 Spinnaker Drive, Ventura, CA 93001; tel. [805] 642-1393) is the lone park concessionaire for transportation to the Channel Islands. The company sends ships to Santa Cruz Island from Ventura Harbor on Tuesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, leaving the mainland at 8 a.m., returning about 5 p.m. The company also sails on Mondays and Wednesdays from Oxnard’s Channel Islands Harbor. Round-trip fare is $42 per adult for day visitors, $54 for overnighters, $6 more with a kayak. Park admission and camping is free, but overnight campers need to sign up for permits from the National Park Service.

When to go: Rangers say winds and temperatures are mildest in late summer and early fall.

Kayaks and guides: Several companies in Ventura and Oxnard rent kayaks. We used OAARS (P.O. Box 1416, Ventura, CA 93001; tel. [805] 642-2913) and paid $75 each for a day’s rental and guided paddling, $20 per kayak for the second day and $10 per kayak for the third day.

National Park Service: For permits or other information, contact the Channel Islands National Park Visitor Center (1901 Spinnaker Drive, Ventura, CA 93001; tel. [805] 658-5711 for free camping permits; for other information, [805] 659-5730).