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Members of the Inverness Yacht Club gather at Tomales Bay once a year for a picnic on Kilkenny Beach.

Members of the Inverness Yacht Club gather at Tomales Bay once a year for a picnic on Kilkenny Beach.

By midafternoon, the beach fills up with people shucking oysters, roasting corn and cooking burgers during the yearly picnic on the Point Reyes National Seashore in western Marin County.

This is a tale of a small adventure with small boats on a beach very near, yet far away. The highlight of the story is a community gathering: tradition served up with beer, corn on the cob and oysters.

Like most people in the Bay Area, I’ve spent a lot of time around the Point Reyes peninsula, hiking, eating in local restaurants and staying in small hotels. It’s becoming more and more popular. The tourism boom hit its high-water mark in 2020, when more than 2.2 million people visited the Point Reyes National Seashore.

But only a handful of people have had the chance to sail a small boat on Tomales Bay and camp on one of the dozen small beaches on its western shore. So when my old pal Richard Everett and his son Carson asked whether I wanted to go to a gathering of the Traditional Small Craft Association combined with the once-a-year Inverness Yacht Club picnic, I jumped at the chance. “We’ll camp on the beach,” Richard said. “We’ll go to the picnic and eat oysters. It will be an adventure.”

We towed his 16-foot sailboat Frolic up from the city and through the back roads of Marin to a gravel launch ramp in the little town of Marshall. It’s always a pleasure to see San Francisco in the rearview mirror, and a greater pleasure to sail off on a weekday morning on the blue waters of Tomales Bay for three days in another world.

It took less than half an hour to cross the bay to the sandy shore of Kilkenny Beach, named by some long-ago Irishman for his distant home. We were the first ones there that day: There was not a human footprint on the beach. We fancied ourselves castaways like Robinson Crusoe in the book, Tom Hanks in the movie.

Others joined us later, but for a while we had the place to ourselves. Nothing to do that first evening but watch the day fade on the golden brown hills across the bay, keep an eye on the distant cars on Highway 1, try to pick out landmarks on the other shore and wait for the moonrise. We had dinner, drank a beer or two and a nightcap of Irish whiskey, in honor of distant Kilkenny. This is the life.

I’d picked the campsite, a sandy bluff with a small hollow backed by brush, and settled down for the night. But I’d forgotten my Shakespeare, particularly a line from Julius Caesar: “There is a tide in the affairs of men …”

There was a full moon that night, a supermoon, the brightest of the summer. And the highest tide of the month — 6½ feet above mean low water. I hadn’t noticed a lagoon behind the beach. It was an estuary, and at high tide the water crept through the low brush. I discovered it myself: My air mattress was awash, my sleeping bag was soaked, and so was I. One of my shoes had capsized and was full of water. It was just past midnight. Everyone who has ever gone camping knows the story: Mother Nature can turn on you. After a long, sleepless, soggy night, I understood why the ancients believed the sun was a god.

The next day was better, with a big low tide and a clammy gray fog in the morning, a warm sun that dried out everything. The third day was best of all. Dozens of boats came sailing or rowing in. Small outboards, sailboats, dories, kayaks. The largest, it was said, was a Flying Scotsman, a sailboat 19 feet long. By midafternoon, the beach was full of people and the shore was lined with boats. Steve Caletti, one of the organizers of the picnic for the Inverness Yacht Club, shucked oysters with a knife. Others roasted corn or cooked burgers. There were kegs of beer and soft drinks. There were kids and dogs, a little music, a lot of small talk.

City people sometimes forget the sense of community that exists in small towns like Inverness, or Point Reyes Station or Marshall, and the other communities of West Marin. The rest of Marin County begins at Fairfax, the other side of White’s Hill. Over the hill, as the locals call it. Nearby but far away.

The people all know each other, or seem to. Some have been around for a long time. “My family has been coming here for years,” said Tom Fox. “We’ve been here forever,” he said. “My great-great-grandfather was mayor of San Francisco, and my great-great-grandmother was in a stagecoach that was held up by Black Bart. And my brother Jim has been the fire chief of the Inverness Volunteer Fire Department for 30 years.”

Back in the old days, the picnic ended with a huge bonfire, but that’s out these days. The event, which seems to happen so spontaneously, requires lots of planning and paperwork, including permits from the National Park Service and an agreement with the Mendoza ranching family, which holds a lease on this part of the national seashore.

“We’ve been doing this picnic for 65 years,” said Ned Congdon, one of the organizers “And we want to keep doing it.”

The picnic ran its course around twilight, and many of the boats shoved off for home. A couple of dozen people stayed the night in tents lining the shore. There was coffee and breakfast in the morning.

“It’s a chance to get out, and sleep on a beach and drift off to the sound of the waves,” Congdon said. “Isn’t that what a park is supposed to be about?”

We left Sunday on the morning tide. Some friends gave the boat a push to clear the beach. “Have a nice sail,” they said. “See you next year.”

Carl Nolte’s columns appear in The San Francisco Chronicle’s Sunday edition. Email: cnolte@sfchronicle.com

Carl Nolte is a fourth generation San Franciscan who has been with The Chronicle since 1961. He stepped back from daily journalism in 2019 after a long career as an editor and reporter including service as a war correspondent. He now writes a Sunday column, "Native Son." He won several awards, including a distinguished career award from the Society of Professional Journalists, a maritime heritage award from the San Francisco Maritime Park Association, and holds honorary degrees from the University of San Francisco and the California State University Maritime Academy.