Tomales Bay Overnight Adventure

Arrive and Meet your ETC Guides
After arriving at Heart’s Desire Beach in Tomales Bay State Park, your trip will begin with an opening circle, giving ETC’s guides an opportunity to meet your group and orient them to the plan for the adventure.

Gear and Paddling Instruction
Next, ETC’s guides will give your group instructions on paddling, safety, and how to pack all our overnight gear and food into the kayaks. If there are participants with special needs, guides will work with them to adapt their kayak and paddling gear for comfort and ease.

The Adventure Begins
With the kayaks packed and everyone ready to paddle, we will begin our journey along the beautiful Tomales Bay shoreline. Along the way you will learn about this unique estuarine environment, with the San Andreas Fault line right down the middle of the bay. While paddling as a team we will encounter some of the bay’s resident birds such as cormorants, egrets, and heron. We might even get lucky and see a bat ray or leopard shark! We will arrive at either Marshall or Tomales Beach to have lunch and set up our camp for the night(s). Both beaches have pit toilets and garbage facilities. We will engage in some group environmental education activities with time to just be and take in the beauty of it all.

Camping and Evening Activities
After a communal dinner, we can play games, share an inspirational reading or poem, or just relax by the campfire and gaze up at the night sky. There are also opportunities to go for a short hike to watch the sunset over the Pacific or to go on a night kayak to witness the beautiful bioluminescence as our paddles create silver green galaxies in the water. Then it’s off to slumber in our tents or out in the open with the night sky as our roof. What a way to drift into dreamland!

Day Two and The Return
On our second morning we will wake up and have a nourishing breakfast, before packing up our belongings, breaking camp and cleaning up the beach to leave it better than we found it. Next, it’s time for a safety refresher before paddling back on the serene morning waters to Heart’s Desire Beach where we began our journey. What a perfect name for a beach after this sweet adventure! We’ll have lunch together and then as a team we’ll help put the kayaks and gear away. In classic ETC style, we’ll wrap up our adventure with a closing circle to share the highlights of our shared journey.