It was a sunny July morning with a brisk little breeze, perfect for a saltwater voyage in a two-person kayak. There was almost no sound, only the cries of birds and the lapping of the waves. It was hard to believe this tranquil spot was less than a thousand yards off the San Francisco waterfront.

“Sometimes you see pelicans out here flying in circles and taking turns at diving for fish,” said Mark Morey, who was doing most of the paddling. “Sometimes seals are out here, playing around. In the afternoon, when the light is just right and the fog is rolling over the hills, it’s just really beautiful. This is our little bit of heaven.”

This is one of the rarest spots in the city, just off the entrance to the Islais Creek Channel, a nowhere kind of place, between Dogpatch and the Bayview district.

Two other kayaks joined our morning paddle. Bo Barnes, president of Kayaks Unlimited, was in one. Jay Oshima, another member, was in the other. For these two veterans of human-powered boats, the trip was routine. It was a voyage of discovery for me.

I prowled the shores of Islais Creek when I was a kid on Potrero Hill, when Islais Creek was an open sewer. I wouldn’t tell my mother what we called that fetid waterway.

I rediscovered Islais Creek a few years ago, when the waters were cleared up and the north shore was developed into a park. It was a curious place, I thought, a city park that was nearly always empty, except for skateboarders and graffiti types.

On a visit the other Sunday afternoon, I ran into Morey at the kayak shed at Islais Landing on the south shore. “Come for a ride,” he said.

A few days later we sailed out from a tiny beach, where it is easy to put a small boat in the water. We headed east, toward the bay, ducked under two drawbridges, and paddled out past the end of Pier 80 into the bay. There is a sensational view of the city skyline just offshore. In a kayak, you are right down on the water, where the only worries are the current and the wind. It is a seal’s-eye view of San Francisco.

We headed back in, to the far west end of the channel, where the waterway ends next to an off-ramp from the 280 freeway and the Caltrain tracks. The shore is lined with abandoned piers, left from the days when Islais Creek was a busy commercial harbor. Copra was shipped in from the Philippines, wheat was shipped out for Europe.

Now it is mostly empty, a canal, 40 feet deep and just short of a mile long, like an industrial Amsterdam. No one can remember when the two drawbridges were raised; no ships have entered the western side of Islais Creek for years.

The Third Street bridge carries a lot of cars and trucks, even the Muni T-Third Street line. It’s not every day you can slide under a bridge in a kayak just as a streetcar clanks overhead.

Just past the drawbridges are tall steel towers on the north shore, once used to load California wheat onto ships. The towers are ancient and rusty, like artifacts from a lost world.

In a way, Islais Creek is a lost world, an out-of-the-way corner of one of the best-known cities in the world. You can explore it on foot for yourself from the corner of Tulare and Indiana streets, the entrance to the grandly named city park, Islais Creek Promenade. Islais Landing is on the other side, on the south shore, just across the Third Street Bridge.

Kayaks Unlimited is the steward of the creek. The organization shares a tiny shed at Islais Landing with the Islais Creek Dragon Boat Training Centre, which sails outrigger canoes. Both groups are into small adventures — the dragon boaters like racing, the kayakers like cruising the channel out into the bay. Good paddles, Morey said, are to Hunters Point or to McCovey Cove and Mission Creek.

“We would like to see more people here,” Morey said.

Barnes, the Kayaks Unlimited president, welcomes new members. “This is a co-op club,” he said. “If you don’t have a kayak, you can borrow one. We will take people out three times to see if they like it. After that, we ask that they join.”

Barnes, who is 71, is one of the bay’s kayak gurus. He’s been at it for years and helped organize the San Francisco Bay Water Trail, a network of more than 70 places from Alviso to Martinez, where kayakers and other human-powered boaters can get access to the bay. Islais Landing was the first such spot in San Francisco.

“I love it,” Morey said of paddling around in San Francisco’s quiet backwater. “It’s my hobby, my passion and my exercise.”

Carl Nolte is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. His column appears every Sunday. Email: cnolte@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @carlnoltesf