We were staying in Marin and looking for something to do. We thought kayaking Tomales Bay might be fun so we made reservations for a couple of boats.

The morning was a little chilly and overcast but as long as there's little wind it makes for good paddling weather. You don’t get your brains beat in with the sun and without the bright glare water visibly is excellent, you can see right down into the eel grass.

This, we found out, can be a mixed blessing.

We started in Inverness and went towards Indian beach and the mouth of the Bay.

The bottom was generally very sandy and with the kayaks we could get right up to the edge of mussel encrusted rocks and shear cliffs.

We were having a good time, just checking things out.

There were a lot of deserted, spooky docks and boat houses along the shoreline.

As you can see, Mr. P paddled ahead of me. This lead to his first big discovery, a leopard shark that he had startled shot off into a patch of thick eel grass and deeper water as soon as he approached. This in term unsettled Mr. P profoundly as even though they are not big by shark standards nor vicious the kayaks are only about 12-16 ft long, only a few inches off the water and very narrow so a 5-7ft shark makes quite an impression.

And there are a lot of leopard sharks in the area, fishermen haul them in all the time. So if you see one there are probably a lot more around you can't see. That got me to thinking because leopard sharks I'm fine with but they are food for a lot of bigger game. And where prey is plentiful so are predators. And I know exactly what predators frequent the area about this time of year.

"Marine mammals prey upon young leopard sharks, and both juvenile and adults are vulnerable to large fish, including the white shark (Carcharodon carcharias)."

- University of Florida, Museum of Natural History, Ichthyology Division

So the base of the freak out begins something like:
There are the sharks you see, then there are the sharks you don't. Some are small and some a big. We are in very small boats, boats barely larger than small sharks.

This is also about the time I recall a passage from one of my favorite books "The Devil's Teeth".

It goes something like this:

"…There's also an ominous place near the mouth of Tomales Bay called Shark Pit, where surfers had recently encountered three white sharks in a single day. Concerned, one them asked Scot, What’s going on? Had there been a sudden influx of seals? Was it a full moon? The red time? The new yellow wetsuit someone was wearing?

“Nah, they’re usually there”, he told them. “You guys just saw ‘em.”...

Yeah. If you look to the horizon, the opening in the middle, that's the Shark Pit.

About this time my thoughts changed from spotting flounder and other benign sea creatures to convincing myself that when I'm in the middle of the channel I'm bound to hit something solid and unforgiving with a paddle stroke or see some flash of mottled grey and white - or maybe even an eye. It was spooky. Thank God the jerky sea lions weren't screwing around in the area. I would have become seriously unhinged.

I was able to put it out of my mind for minutes at time but to be honest between the shark spotting and the gloomy weather I was sort of happy to get off the water after 4 hours. But part of me wanted to at least catch a glimpse of something unidentifiable. Maybe. It's a lot easier to say once your on dry land.