Mendocino Coast catching flood debris from Russian River

Staffers at the Point Arena Lighthouse are accustomed to seeing spectacular sights from their vantage point at the edge of the ocean on the southern Mendocino Coast.

The rugged scenery, migrating whales and other wildlife on display along that particular stretch of coastline are exactly what draw tens of thousands of visitors to the region each year.

But never has anyone seen anything quite so exotic as the fiberglass hot tub that bobbed through the waves past the promontory earlier this month - perhaps the most bizarre example of the debris swept north as flood waters gushed from the mouth of the Russian River after it spilled its banks.

“We were all laughing,” Mark Hancock, the lighthouse’s executive director, said of the day a rogue hot tub appeared out on the Pacific and almost got caught up in some offshore rocks below the bluff before heading off to who-knows-where.

Hundreds of pieces of detritus believed to have been swept downstream after being snatched from homes, resorts and yards by the swollen Russian River have been deposited along the Mendocino Coast as far north as MacKerricher State Park in Fort Bragg, 100 miles away, over the past few weeks.

It is a tiny sample of the terrible destruction wrought by the flood, which caused an estimated $155 million in damage to homes, businesses, roads and other public infrastructure.

Much of the stuff washing up in Mendocino County has been woody debris, including logs and branches, as well as chunks of boat dock and buildings torn away by the powerful flood.

But there have also been the odd hot tub, several propane tanks and other unidentifiable objects, as well as two small boats found in the Fort Bragg vicinity.

A doorless refrigerator discovered south of Point Arena near Bowling Beach and Schooner Gulch may or may not have come from the Russian River or have been dumped in a nearby creek and washed toward the ocean by recent rains, nearby residents said.

No one knows if the hot tub ever came ashore, but plenty of other stuff has.

There’s “lots of it,” said Sonoma Mendocino Coast District State Park Safety Superintendent Loren Rex. “Lots of it.”

It was MacKerricher State Park where a 14-foot aluminum boat still strapped to its trailer arrived just more than a week after the Russian River rose to its highest level in a quarter century. The Feb. 27 flood floated the garbage cans at Bill Peters’ mom’s place in Villa Grande and apparently picked up the trailered boat for the trip down river to the ocean and then up the coast.

“Never underestimate the power of Mother Nature,” Peters, 53, said Thursday from Danville, where he lives most of the time and endured the storm that sent the water up around his vacation home on Moscow Road. “It’s just amazing that it didn’t get caught up in the river - just the power of the river going through, the currents, are just so strong.”

The vessel was next spotted March 7, floating offshore near MacKerricher.

“No one aboard and it was still on its trailer,” Rex said. “That was kind of odd.”

Before long, it had become stuck on a rocky reef, where the force of the waves loosened the boat from its trailer and it washed ashore. Identifying numbers tied the boat to Peters, who was stunned to receive three consecutive calls from different agencies on the coast alerting him to the find and verifying no one had been aboard.

For his part, Peters was surprised to learn the boat had not been stolen.

His brother-in-law lives in west Sonoma County and thought he’d seen the boat in its usual location when he checked the property two days after the flood. When Peters came to clean up the following weekend and found it missing, he assumed someone had looted it.

The trailer is still stuck on the rocks, but Peters’ niece drove him north in a flatbed trailer to collect the boat, which is in surprisingly good shape, he said.

“It’s still mind-boggling,” he said.

Doug Forsell, a retired U.S. Fish and Wildlife seabird biologist who lives south of Point Arena, is among several coastal birders who have reported finding flood debris on local beach.

Manchester Beach, a broad, sandy beach, is among his usual bird and wildlife survey areas. There, he has found an unusually spherical propane tank as well as a more cylindrical one about a mile away, and a large plastic rectangle marked Bobo Resort, located in Monte Rio, though he cannot discern what it is.

There’s also a lot of “really nice pieces of wood - like parts of decks and buildings” he wishes he could figure out how to haul across the sand dunes for projects at home.

John Largier, an oceanographer with the UC Davis Bodega Marine Lab, said the scattering of debris so far to the north is an indication of the size of the river plume, at least in part, though the ocean current also would typically flow northward at this time of year, in contrast to the strong southward current that normally exists later in the year.

Even if the ocean current reversed, a large enough plume will turn to the right and hug the coastline under the influence of the earth’s rotation, Largier said.

Gualala nature columnist Jeanne Jackson wondered aloud what might happen if the ocean current reversed course in the coming weeks and started carrying cargo south again.

“I kind of half expect the hot tub to come back down,” Jackson said.

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan at 707-521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MaryCallahanB.