Santa Barbara News-Press Travel Section 8/20/2000 by DeAnne Musolf Crouch

Kayaking the Pacific puts a new perspective on Santa Barbara


Living down by the harbor, on my morning beach walks, I often saw kayakers skimming across the calm quiet water as graceful as water bugs. On a mirror-like sea, their paddles rhythmically dipped, birds and wildlife remained undisturbed.
This was not that testosterone-driven paddling. This was paddling as art, paddling as meditation.
I always hoped I might get a chance to try it one day. Then I saw a brochure for Judy Keim's Pedal & Paddle of Santa Barbara. In it, this Santa Barbara history and nature aficionado promised to show clients the town "from a different perspective".
I give her a call and ask if she does family-type outings, thinking my visiting nephews, Jacob 14 and Lucas 8, would be blown away by such an outing.
"Kayaking is a great interactive activity for adults and children," Keim enthuses. She adds that the kayaks are the novice-friendly, open-cockpit, self-bailing type that don't require rolling, are easy to learn to use and accessible to everyone who is in good health and can swim.
"Do they know how to swim", Keim asks. Then she asks for their heights, weights and ages. The youngest kayaker she'll take out in his/her own boat is generally around 10 years of age (The oldest to brave it so far has been 73). Lucas, we decide, might perhaps want his own kayak (8 being one of those ages where he could be mortified by the idea of going it along - or by the idea of sharing one, the intuitive Keim points out.) I ask him: he wants to share. We make a reservation.
The boys and I meet Keim at Sea Landing on a misty August morning. We're wearing bathing suits with shorts and T-shirts over the top. Because it's a cool morning. Keim checks us all for sunglasses with croakies, shoes that can get wet and hats. What we don't have she pulls out of an organized array of goodies in her van. Next she fits us for vests. Since I'm six months pregnant, mine rides a little high. She fits me with a larger model.
Still standing firmly on dry land, she teaches us how to hold and use the paddles correctly, explaining that the paddling force should come from pushing, using our larger back muscles rather than from pulling, which taxes the smaller muscles in our arms. The boys are a quick study. Then she shows us how to get into a kayak properly, how to balance
and how not to fall out.
They follow suit with great relish and with her assistant David Hammock, Keim launches their double kayak into the friendly harbor water.
Lucas and Jacob paddle out to the Condor, moored 50 feet away, then turn and come back. Under Keim's instructions, their paddles dip and rise in unison as if they are synchronized water ballerinas.
"This is fun", Lucas shouts.
With that proclamation, Keim and I launch and follow them out. It's smooth sailing through the harbor mouth and onto the great Pacific. Sea gulls call; the water is like glass. So close to the water, we immediately see fish jumping. It's one of those foggy mornings where the mist lends a surreal feeling to the boats we pass, the shrouded coastline and mountains in the distance.
Already I'm seeing Santa Barbara from a different perspective.
First, we skim along to the bait barge where Keim points out the different marking of 1-year old and adolescent brown pelicans (which - to my astonishment - the boys repeat later on the phone to their mother). It's an exciting few minutes as we paddle between the pilings under the wharf. In the gloom, with cars rumbling overhead, Keim reveals a hidden treasure; plump red and gold colored sea stars clinging to the heavy wood pilings that I never knew. From there we paddle towards that curious blue boat draped in netting that's anchored off East Beach. "It's an oil cleaning boat", Keim tells us, and explains the story of the huge oil spill that prompted it. We paddle close to sea longs fighting for a perch on a buoy beside the boat. "They haul out to sleep here during the day", she explains.
There's a red tide running and Keim goes into what the strange bands of crimson water are all about. Sometimes, Keim says, she sees dolphins out here; once a gray whale and its baby went under her kayak. I soon realized that this is indeed no ordinary kayaking tour, it's a nature, conservation and history tour as well.
Keim started Pedal & Paddle in 1992, though she started exploring the Central Coast by bike and kayak 20 years ago after her knees blew out and she had to give up her beloved back country hikes. She's studied local flora and fauna as a member of the Audubon Society and the Museum of Nature History. "And I've read

all of Barney's books - I've done my homework," she laughs. She's also picked up history tidbits from her husband - a third generation Santa Barbaran, whose grandfather was Max Fleishman's chauffeur.
She now has a fleet of 7 kayaks - the liability limit; for bigger groups she rents from Paddle Sports. Her first customer, a visitor from Singapore, returns every year for a harbor tour. Many customers have received the tour as a gift. "It's great for Mother's Day, Father's Day, birthdays - because it's something people can do together", says Keim.
Keim is also particularly interested in making kayaking accessible to people with disabilities. She's taken out a family that couldn't hear (this year was their second voyage); and many who are blind - who travel in their own kayaks using sound and voice instruction; and people with AIDS, in double kayaks or towed if they are too weak to paddle.
For everyone, she says, her trips are "not just about getting out here and sweating - not about getting from Point A to Point B with sore muscles.". Instead, she hopes her clients enthusiasm over what they see and experience on the water will compel them to act differently toward the aquatic environment.
"If they see a sea lion close up, on one of the buoys, a person is less likely to drop a cigarette butt in the water,", she says by way of example.
As we head farther down the coast, Keim points out details about the estates we spy along the cliffs and tells us about the history of the zoo and the Andrea Clark Bird Refuge, which used to connect to the ocean and offered a secluded cove for pirate ships. The boys are psyched with this detail. Jake says it's neat to be out on the ocean like this.
As we near our destination, butterfly Beach - a full three miles from where we started - we pass another kayaker who is heading back toward the harbor. Clearly a testosterone paddler, he's already been to Summerland this morning.
Keim asks us to pause at the swim buoys to give us instructions on landing our kayaks in Butterfly's raucous surf. With that, she turns and paddles in then gives the boys


and then me the green light to follow.
In a surge of white water, our kayaks surf right up onto the sand with nary a wet T-shirt.
The Hammocks meet us with baskets of fruit, cashews, and granola bars, blankets and towels. While they load the kayaks on to the vehicle, we munch tangerines and the boys look back at the ocean and chatter away about what they saw and felt. Already they are talking about when we'll do it next year.

If you go


Pedal and Paddle of SB offers two-hour, half-day and full-day kayaking tours, anywhere along the coast from Gaviota to Carpinteria for beginners to advanced paddlers. Pedal and Paddle tours include a guide, kayaks, paddles, life vests, towels and snacks on the beach at the pick-up point and transport back to the starting point. (The driver will even bring your dry clothes - not that you'll necessarily get wet). Wear a bathing suit with shorts and a T-shirt over the top. Keim will supply a nylon paddling jacket if it's cool out.
At the company name implies Pedal & Paddle owner and guide extraordinaire, Judy Keim, also offers bike tours, including "Hidden Art in SB" and "Wetlands".
Two-hour, half-day and full-day kayaking or biking or combinations of tours start at $45.00 per person. Prices can be adjusted for folks with their own kayaks or bikes. Lunch ban be added to any tour.
For more information on Pedal and Paddle's kayak or bike tours, call 687-2912 or visit its Web site at www.nvstar.com/pedpad.

-DeAnne Musolf Crouch is a Santa Barbara-based free-lance writer