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< January February 2007
	Destinations
Santa Barbara Soliloquy A circumnavigation of California’s cherished Channel Island Chuck Graham

Ragged waves pounded the battered basalt walls of Santa Barbara Island and rebounded toward me, forcing me to teeter on the edge of my seat while paddling around the craggy islet. Formed by underwater volcanic activity 20 million years ago, Santa Barbara Island juts abruptly out of the Pacific Ocean 40 miles offshore of Ventura County, Calif. It’s the loneliest of the five islands in the Channel Islands National Park. The island has no beaches, and not a single tree grows on its windswept mesa. Aside from two park service biologists, the tallest living thing on the island is the giant coreopsis, a flowering shrub averaging four feet in height.

I was free to roam over the island and paddle around the 300-foot-high cliffs. The wind was the real challenge. My tent was nearly shredded by squalls that picked up speed throughout the night. During long episodes of sleeplessness, I extended my arms and legs against the four walls of my feeble enclosure, hoping it wouldn’t blow off the island.

If the wind was blowing hard, so were the island’s blowholes, harbored in many of the island’s sea caves. Three monumental rock arches are situated on the most rugged portions of the island. Inhabiting this rocky fortress are endemic deer mice, secretive night lizards and a wide array of pelagic bird species. Along with its distant neighbor, Anacapa, Santa Barbara Island is the main breeding and nesting colony for the federally protected brown pelican. They share the remote island with 8,000 squawking pairs of western seagulls that seem to nest in every nook and cranny on the one square mile of land.

Kayaking around Santa Barbara granted me access to all the places I couldn’t reach on foot. Landing Cove offers the only access from the island to the ocean. From there I put in amongst the deep bellows of raucous sea lions basking on a rocky pinnacle swept by dense strands of giant kelp. The new dawn warmed my back as I paddled northwest toward Arch Point, while my inquisitive, flippered friends trailed my stern in a flurry of breaches, dives, swoops and splashes.

Paddling to the towering arch was effortless, but once I rounded its extensive mass I faced a stronger current and stiff northwest wind raising whitecaps on the hazy horizon. Ranchers who worked on the island during the early 1900s mentioned the wind often in books and letters, telling of chickens blown out to sea. The swell on the west side of the island had increased, too, with six-foot wind waves bashing the crusty cliffs.

Flocks of three types of cormorants, undaunted by the elements, perched comfortably on precarious ledges, peering down at me. A flurry of enraged gulls launched themselves high above when the only pair of peregrine falcons on the island dove toward them like fighter jets hoping to flush a straggler.

I paddled between the island and Shag Rock, a favorite hangout for gulls, pelicans, cormorants, pigeon guillemots and black oystercatchers. Cutting a swath between cathedrals of rock and a patch of sand, I could hear the yelps and snorts of juvenile northern elephant seals jockeying for precious space and flipping sand onto their broad backs to ward off the sun’s penetrating rays.

A little farther on, after the wind carried away the seals’ commotion, I got my first view of tiny, impenetrable Sutil Island, a quarter mile southwest of Santa Barbara. On its eastern side, surging waves swept over a barnacle-encrusted reef at the foot of a vertical cliff—the only accessible port of landing, and a risky one at best. It’s hard to imagine that night lizards also inhabit Sutil, which from my vantage point appears lifeless and exposed to the elements. While I was there, a lone fishing trawler worked the south side of Sutil, using the island as a buffer from the persistent northwesterlies and the churning swell.

The same forces propelled me with ease around the island’s southern tip. The gaping ravine known as Cat Canyon opened up to my left, as the first of several thousand sea lions greeted me with a barrage of barks, bellows and grunts. I wondered if the canyon got its name from the feral cat population that once dominated the island’s fauna before 1900.

My paddling relaxed on the east side, as swell and wind dissipated and the chorus of sea lions increased. On bluffs barely rising above the ocean, the head-bobbing sea lions guarded their desolate turf like an aquatic army. The bulls—with their thick necks—protected their harems, while mothers nursed their young, and pups frolicked on land and in the shallows. Their echoing bellows blasted from the bluffs, and I could even hear the ones swimming a quarter mile away in the cobalt-blue water. Some of the more brazen sea lions, bulls that possessed a helmet-like hump at the top of their heads, charged my kayak, only to dart underneath it at the last possible instant.

Above the rookery, where the bluffs grew steeper and formed a narrow canyon, nesting pelicans sat on their roosts tending to their fledglings, while many more soared above.

Farther north, more than 100 adolescent elephant seals huddled on what little beach remained as the tide surged higher. As I watched from the backside of cresting waves, several sea lion yearlings playfully thrust themselves onto the broad backs of the elephant seals while they wallowed in the incoming tide. The gigantic pinnipeds weren’t pleased with the waggish sea lion pups who mocked their larger cousins, nipping their thick necks.

A quarter mile from the Landing Cove, when I was greeted by the same gang of sea lion pups that had escorted me out in the morning. They seemed pleased to see me, as if they knew I’d paddled without peril around their imposing domain.