Ronn Patterson’s Delphinus had just passed the latest rigorous U.S. Coast Guard inspection, and he was free to relax a bit in the cozy cabin. This year’s season of Delta tours was over, most of the migrating birds had already flown north to their breeding grounds, and soon Ronn too would be heading that way. Each year for the past 27 years he has spent summers in Alaska, leading natural history trips along the southeastern coast. Around October, as the vast flocks fly south, he and his crew return to the Bay Area, ready to lead trips on San Francisco Bay, up the Petaluma River and Napa River, to Suisun Marsh and, most especially, into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

To go out into the Delta on the Delphinus with Captain Patterson is to enter a strange watery world unimagined until one has been there. I did that in February, along with most of the staff of the Coastal Conservancy, on a day of blasting winds and clear skies, when cormorants were roosting in snaggly trees on the levees and huge flocks of Canada geese, sandhill cranes, and other waterfowl were fattening up in the sunken and flooded farmlands.

Throughout the eight-hour trip, Patterson talked and pointed things out as he steered the trawler-style yacht through a labyrinth of channels bordered by rustling reeds. He was a fount of knowledge, which he delivered with passionate eloquence. At the end I was left wanting to know more about him, so we made an appointment and met aboard the boat on April 3.

Coast & Ocean: You’ve been leading these trips for 27 years. That’s a long time. Do you ever get bored?

Ronn Patterson: I never get bored. There’s always more to discover. A place gets richer and richer, the more you discover it.

You have an enviable way of life, seems to me. How did you start out?

I had already been doing it, at the University of California Extension at Berkeley. I started the natural environmental studies program there in 1963 and also the photography program. I retired in 1976. (He’s 68 now.)

So you come from an academic background?

From the time I was a kid, I felt I had always been a biologist. I was always running around exploring things. My parents always lived on the edge of some part of town that had a wild area beside it--in the Midwest, in Texas. We lived on the edge of Chicago, on the edge of Wolf Lake, on the Indiana-Illinois border. This is also the southern edge of Lake Michigan, which had been a huge swamp and marsh. I found a rotting boat there, and with help from a friend with tools, I rebuilt it so I could get into the marsh and lake. From the moment of pushing off from shore, I have loved boats.

When I was in college I worked on ore freighters on the Great Lakes, carrying iron ore to steel mills in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. Pretty messy business, but it got me an opportunity to be on boats.