California Coast & Ocean

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.

The University of Chicago, and that was such a broad educational experience, and to me such an overwhelming experience, that the only focus I maintained was the one I always had, which was an interest in biology. I took a lot of courses in different fields and could have graduated in several, but when it was time to graduate I had to pick one, so I picked biopsychology. I came to Berkeley partly to study with Peter Marler [who was researching animal communications, particularly birdsong]. But he went off to a hugely wonderful job at Rockefeller University in New York. With him gone and myself just getting started, I wasn’t sure what to do next. There was the ocean though. I went into marine biology and spent a couple of summers at the Bodega Marine Laboratory, and I loved it.

At some point I realized I had been spending half of a year on boats one way or the other, in South America, Mexico, Alaska, Hawaii, and California. So in 1981 I got this boat. It was built 53 years ago, with a tried and true design that’s several hundred years old. It had been a workboat in the Seattle area, then a private yacht. [It can comfortably carry 30 passengers.] I spent a year getting it Coast Guard-certified for passenger-for-hire, and this is what I’ve been doing ever since.

So when you say retired, you mean you left teaching at U.C. and started your own floating classroom?

I tell my friends I retired so I could work eight days a week doing what I like to do, which is a combination of natural history and cultural history. I have exciting people from all over the world, though mostly Americans, as my guests, and about half are returning. One couple has been for 22 years, two trips per year. You ask do I get tired of it? Well, they don’t get tired of it. We operate without an itinerary. We agree where we’re going to meet and where we’re going to end, and let it all happen.

On the website of his enterprise, Dolphin Charters, Patterson describes himself as “a naturalist by profession, a marine biologist by training, a student of whales by practice, a professional photographer by habit, a teacher by inclination, and a writer by requirement.”

He has created for himself something that most people only dream of: a way to make a living doing what he loves. Yet of course it’s not all as simple as it might appear. Besides navigating channels, he has to navigate through bureaucracy. His preference for traveling without itinerary, for instance, doesn’t necessarily fit well with the rule books of agencies whose job is to protect wilderness environments. In Alaska his trips go only to national wilderness areas established by Act of Congress.

I had three or four e-mails from the U.S. Forest Service recently about our wilderness permit for the incredible Tongass National Forest--truly a national treasure. There’s a limited number they give out. It’s for ten years and I’m on my third one. You have to specify how many guests [he can take eight, plus four crew] and how many days you’ll have on land, and you can only go over by five percent or under by five percent.

Why? Why so precise?

I don’t know. In one sense, it’s easy to do on a spreadsheet--in an office! But it isn’t easy when you have guests who want to go to places of maximum opportunity, to see where salmon are abundant, where bears are most likely to be on a river flat eating sedge, where we know there are eagles nesting or glaciers calving at a particular time.

Icebergs collapsing.

In Endicott Arm the Dawes Glacier has retreated two miles since 1984. In Glacier Bay--another of our favorite places to explore--the Muir Glacier is now grounded.

Alaska and the Delta. The contrast is pretty great.

The clear connection between Alaska and California is the salmon. Maybe peregrine falcons, too. We lost a lot of our locals and their niches were filled by migrants from the north who came down for the winter and ended up staying.

The Delta is the heart of California, it’s where the water is, where what I consider the very best wildlife habitat is.

How so? Why is it the very best? The Delta is full of plumbing, it’s crossed by power lines and pipes, it’s pumped and drained and farmed and developed.

The Delta has everything that wildlife needs--in abundance. It has water, food, shelter, and it’s all contiguous, all together. It is a mosaic of habitats: rivers and streams, marshes and seasonally flooded hardwood forests (or swamps), stream-side forests and shrubbery, and most importantly, intertidal freshwater sloughs.

Forty percent of California drains into the Delta. Each of those waterways, each of those rivers, streams, and creeks, is a wildlife corridor. Some are the blue highways, some are interstates, the equivalent of I-5, because the animals move along those corridors, either in the water or in the shelter belt of the streamside woods, or a little of both if they’re amphibians. Some are moving through the trees, like squirrels and birds. So those animals can move from the Sierra to the Central Valley in the winter and back in the summer.

Formerly these waterways were all the home of salmon. Salmon is where it all comes together. They breed in the fresh water, go out into the ocean, they bring the nutrients of the ocean back to the land, feeding animals and trees and shrubs. In Alaska, as much as 80 percent of nitrogen in the trees many yards from the stream is brought there by the salmon. If we look in California at the Napa Valley, many of the nutrients left over are left there by dead and dying salmon. But we’re losing, we’re losing the connection.

The Cosumnes is the largest undammed river in California. The others are all dammed and managed--or mismanaged! The Shasta Dam blocks nearly 80 percent of salmon spawning areas; the Friant Dam near Fresno takes 100 percent of the San Joaquin’s water, leaving 65 miles of dry riverbed below. A wild river is not easy to live with because rivers by their very nature change course, and they flood. So the rivers are managed, and they’re cutting off overflows. When a river floods over its banks, fish can get to weeds and seeds and insects. The more they eat, the faster they grow, and the faster they grow, the better their chance of survival.

Yes. But go back a bit. When you say the Delta is the best habitat in California, what are you comparing?

It all comes together there, all based around water. The Delta includes brackish water, fresh, and salt. We have intertidal marshes--fresh water is being forced up into dead-end sloughs with the tides, then draining out. Two highs, two lows every day, pumping water in and out, much like arteries and veins. The Delta is truly California’s heart.

So if you want to experience the rich abundance of California, this is where you’d come, to the Delta?

You’d come to the Delta.

And to truly experience it you have to go out on the water?

I think so. I felt that as a kid. You gotta get out there. You have to be on the water to experience the essence of our planet--the water planet. And water is life; life is water.

Please talk a bit about what you see when on your trips.

A great horned owl pair--I don’t know if it’s the same individuals or their offspring--have been in the same place for 24 years. Beaver, river otters. They have territories, home addresses. By coming out regularly, you anticipate: Is so and so home today? To me it’s amazing that they’re there almost all the time.

A lot of different people, too, living below sea level on Bethel Island. Many ethnicities. There’s the Shima Tract--Shima was known as the potato king of the Delta. That was in the 1920s and ‘30s, during the time Asians couldn’t own lands.

After that trip with you, I was thinking that everyone who has anything to do with decisions about the Delta needs to come out on the water.

In that first year, when I was working on the boat and it wasn’t ready and I was dying to go out on the water, I took several trips bicycling around some of the islands around Walnut Grove and felt like I was on top of the curve, I really knew the area. But when I got there with the boat, it was a totally different place. I knew nothing about this place, and it was a big shock to me. The experience on the water is totally different. It’s a different time frame, a different mind frame--a drifting, floating state of mind, as well as of water. It’s easy to feel lost. I think that’s what people experience.

The land disappears.

It comes in second. The islands define that space, putting edges on it, not necessarily making sense of it but making it like a labyrinth. They do what clouds do to the sky. A clear sky is not nearly as dramatic as when you have those puffballs up there.

In the Delta everything is connected with water. We’re 70 percent water. Life is water. This is a place to acknowledge our dependence on water. We get a lot of southern California people who start talking about our water, their water. What I try to get across is it’s our water. L.A. is tremendously ahead of the curve in using local water, while the State of California just keeps pumping out groundwater. There are solutions, and L.A. is on to some of them.

The Delta, with its flows and counterflows, is a place that allows us to go to other places in the mind and another sense of time than we normally experience--to go outside our boundaries. So it’s refreshing to get out there without any intent and purpose, to drift and discover.

Teilhard de Chardin said: “We are the universe observing itself.” We need to go to places beyond what we imagine to experience the fullness and richness of the universe. For me it all starts with water. Around the water molecule evolves life. It all starts with a drop.

On May 22, as swans and snow geese were nesting on frozen tundra, Captain Ronn Patterson set out for the north.