When we arrived at the put in point just below the Highway 1 bridge, there was lots of activity, but pretty quickly we were signed up and out on the water just above the bridge. After a while we were asked to gather for instructions ("wear lifejackets, no littering"), and then we were off. An hour or so down the utterly lovely, winding estuary (which I was too busy to take pictures of, but there's a nice one here) we started seeing something strange on the right bank. Turned out (we discovered later) it was a couple of WWII landing barges abandoned there to rust. There were other less identifiable ruins there in a couple of hundred yard of riverbank.. Just past that the river suddenly stopped being a winding estuary and became a river again, with spectacular stone banks (tide was going out) and before we knew it we were approaching the wharf at Five Fathom Hole where we decided to take the canoe out and wait -- quite a while, as it turned out -- for everyone else to arrive and for the shuttle back to the car. Looking out toward the bay we could see why we'd heard the suggestion that it might not be a good idea to proceed without a sea kayak. So we waited endlessly for people with no sense of the situation to get their cars loaded and out of the middle of the road . . . and trundled back to the Ridge.