The San Juan Islands

Trails and tribulations of three out of shape kayakers

We made it to Canada! Our crossing day entailed crossing Haro Strait, which was hard, a 4:30 am wake up call, sitting in our paddling gear at the customs dock on hold for almost two hours, (some grouchy yatchers) then frantically running around town while I held the position of three boats in silt while Ebba and Andy looked for some things in town we needed, then wrapping up with a beautiful evening and a total of 19 miles that day.

I also want to thank everyone for their patience with my typos, especially in the last two posts! It’s been challenging to find the time to write, let alone edit, and while I’d love to promise to be more diligent in the future, I’ll probably end up with less time to write but more to say, and hence more typos— it doesn’t help that I’m doing everything from an iPhone fueled by an external battery! Even now, I’m posting this from a tiny sliver of rock with cell service and extremely limited time (after copy/pasting from my “notes” app.

Nevertheless, thanks for bearing with me.

THE SAN JUAN ISLANDS

The San Juan Islands are an archipelago in Northern Washington known for cliffs, rugged coastline, and wildlife. The islands are extremely popular among sailors and sea kayakers.

For us, the San Juan Islands was the first section of many. We altered our route quite a bit from the planned route for a total of about 10 days instead of 6 in the islands, and opted to go through the center to learn more about tidal currents rather than stick to the open outer islands and conditions we’re more familiar with.

LUMMI ISLAND

We started off with about an 8-mile paddle from Bellingham, WA to Lummi Island. This was one of my favorite campsites for views specifically, but an awful gear carry up from the beach.

We stayed here two nights in order to do some gear repairs.

CYPRUS HEAD

After Lummi Island we paddled about 10 miles to Cyprus Head. Another pretty campsite with a long walk for fresh water. We stayed here two nights, treating the second day as a chance to acclimate to being on trail.

LOPEZ ISLAND

After that we headed to Lopez Island, tackling our first serious crossing of the trip and tidal currents. We were windbound on Lopez the following day due to 35 knot gusts, and the day after that we had to tend to Andy’s splinter.

JONES ISLAND

A 15-mile day to Jones Island. One of my favorite places we stayed. Maybe I was just thirsty but the water here was incredible.

STUART ISLAND

After Jones, we tackled a 9-mile day out to Stuart by way of San Juan Island then Spieden. This was by far the hardest day of the trip for me.

We had a kind of hairy crossing of the tidal currents from San Juan to Spieden with a lot of poor communication within our group. While it never resulted in an obviously risky situation, everyone was pretty frustrated with everyone. And we got rushed by a sea lion when we came around a corner too close. Can’t win them all.

By the time we made it to Stuart, it was almost 8pm and pretty clear we would not be ready to do the border crossing the next day. Instead we stayed a second day at Stuart and worked on the plan for the following day as a group.

Our little camp tucked away by the shore

Any paddling trip with all guides can be really hard interpersonally, but especially an extended paddling trip with friends who are all guides, but who don’t necessarily have backcountry experience together. It’s definitely been a lot harder with group risk management and communication than I thought it would be. We’ve gotten better at it, but the Spieden Channel crossing through a tide rip was definitely a wake up call that we need to be on the same page *before* we decide to cross in conditions.

As a solution we’ve been taking a lot of active steps to problem solve and route plan in advance, and on the water really focusing on asking clarifying questions and taking the extra time to discuss all possible risks, even the ones that seem obvious or silly to bring up. Right now, this looks like sitting down after dinner and figuring out all of the possible details of the plan tomorrow as a group and breaking down what went well and what didn’t at the end of the day.

We’ve had a few really hard days, and a few beautiful sunsets and seal encounters, been roared at by a sea lion (they roar), walked across an island past goats and rolling fields to get a cup of coffee and restock on tortillas, ended up in bigger conditions than we meant to and managed, and all together are having a good time.

Days on trips like these run together, route and stories like something out of the Odyssey, the people you meet like characters out of a myth, places you visit plucked from a fairytale. It’s starting to feel a little like that—

Like a fairytale adventure story.

The San Juan Islands, with the porpoises and friendly seals, sea cliffs and wildflowers, Lopez Island with rolling field and small farms with goats, a tiny church and town tucked away on the harbor, Jones Island’s castaway cove, the mountains in the distance over Puget Sound to the south, all of that reads a little like a fairytale.