What to Find at Point Reyes, CA

May 26


Nick's Cove, located on west shore of Tomales Bay, looking out over the peninsula of Point Reyes National seashore, is an enduring symbol of California coastline culture.  A grand platte of land that started as a ranch possessed by President Lincoln chief of staff from the days of the Civil War, sold again and became a shallow water landing that came to host a variety of trades such saddle making, duck raising and dairy farming.  As the widespread migration to the west coast continued, so too did both the need for more transportation and the need for a more sturdy farming community to support the bustling new city of San Francisco only thirty miles south of the shore and bay.  The North Pacific Coast Railroad constructed tracks right along the shorefront at the cove back in 1873, soon followed

up a modern highway in 1930.  These transportation links north, but especially south toward the population, opened up the dramatically beautiful and abundant shorelines to tourism, commercial fishing, and an entirely new level of tourism.  The potential of the cove, and its similarity in landscape of coastline easter Europe, brought the Yugoslavian family of Nick and Dorothy Kojich to the area,

where they proceeded to give Nick's Cove its namesake and its more permanent lure for tourism, hospitality, and a very authentic fisherman's wharf style restaurant that now not only serves at the road front restaurant, but at the back end of the pier fishing shack which has been touted by travel magazines as one of the top 20 hotel bars in the country.  As the tide churns inward and out over the

flats below, the sun shines over the Reyes cliffs or the fog hangs low and thick over a calm bay, Nicks is as much a part of the regional country and history as any other, serving also as gathering hub for locally grown farm products, cheeses, seafood.  Recently, head chef Austin Perkins along with the GM have installed what they have called The Croft across the highway – a fully functioning and kitchen stocking garden.  The visitor, then, can descend on Nicks and have very few reasons to leave, as it is cottage hotel, restaurant, fishing landing, hiking hub, bikers highway.  For a city that boasts more thoughtful gourmet restaurants than any other in the country, its residents might make the fairly short trek out of town to get a taste of real California.