By Nate Seltenrich

The water on my bare feet feels surprisingly warm – no cooler than the air, about 50 degrees. It’s 5:40 a.m. and the sky is only half-dark, all grey. Orange lights reflect off the glassy turning basin, full of sleeping yachts. No cars rumble over the D Street bridge as I slip beneath it on my stand-up paddleboard, a light breeze pushing me out of town. 

I’m here, at this hour, because of Cate Swan. She’s not with me – not physically. Mentally, I’m thinking about her early-morning rows year-round on the Petaluma River, sometimes in conditions much less inviting than this. 

I wonder if she hears the same birds: the song sparrow and red-winged blackbird, the hooded oriole and tree swallow. I wonder if she smells the same sweet scent of dry grass, fennel, and salt hanging over the water. 

“It’s always different,” she said. “Every day is different. And Petaluma, for some reason, has more colored sunrises than we do. We hardly have any color here in Monte Rio.”

She can see the Russian River from her house. And yet three or four times a week, she wakes well before dawn and drives an hour to the North Bay Rowing Club facility on the Petaluma River to board her teal-blue, nearly 27-foot Sykes single scull. Sleek and narrow, the boat is operated facing backwards, with two long oars.

Swan has been doing this for about 11 years. She is 73 years old. 

“I try to row every other day, but it doesn’t always work out,” she said. “That’s the aspiration. And as the days get lighter earlier, I’m getting up earlier and getting on the water earlier. At this point, when the skies are clear, I really want to be launching by about 5:15. So that means I get up early,” she laughed.

“It’s nature,” she said of the appeal. “I love water. I think, for me, rowing in the morning is the magical time of day. I like watching it get light.”

Unlike the Russian River, the Petaluma River has favorable conditions year-round: not too high in the winter or too low in the summer. And the tides, which reverse every six hours, are an added bonus: “When it’s high tide, I feel like I’m up on top of the world,” she said.

“I’ve heard people say that the Petaluma River is one of the best rowing rivers in the country.”

It also courses through world-class wetlands. “I will stop for birds,” Swan said. “I will stop and watch those guys go through their mating rituals, or because the Canada geese have babies right now, I will watch how everybody gets along, or how they tussle and then work it out. Nature is the greatest teacher.”

She sees harbor seals and river otters. Phalanxes of snowy egrets flying low over the water, right around her boat. Bald eagles. “Pelicans, I’ve discovered, are probably the most elegant bird in flight.”

One morning, Swan was far downstream when an oar broke. Sculls are naturally unstable, and she spilled into the water. The water was full of tiny, two-inch jellyfish. She was fine, but won’t soon forget it.

On my own early-morning journey I pass a barge whose edge is lined with earthen cliff swallow nests. The birds dart in and out of their tiny homes as I drift by at eye level. I encounter floating families of ducks and geese. I find a deer just feet from the river’s edge, peering over the water. I marvel at dense thickets of alkali bulrush, a key plant species of the Petaluma marsh.

And I see my first fellow boater at about 7:15 a.m., miles from town: a woman rowing a scull alone, like Swan. Next come two men in kayaks, then a group of eight women and a coxswain on a boat in a sweep oar setup, with rowers pulling single oars on alternating sides. Then I see a quadruple scull, and a single stand-up paddler. 

I see people fishing from shore at Alman Marsh. I wave to the SMART bridge operator. I return to the turning basin.

The rest of town is still waking up.