San Juan Islands kayak trip, Part 1: Getting there

Labor Day signaled the beginning of the end of our first full summer in Seattle. We thought it would be fitting to have a capstone experience before the earth started its inexorable tilt towards winter. And we picked the perfect way to do it: a three-day kayaking-and-camping trip in the San Juan Islands.

On Monday the 1st (Labor Day), we began our trip in downtown Seattle, boarding the Victoria Clipper for a three-and-a-half-hour voyage to Friday Harbor on San Juan Island. That run of the clipper serves both as transportation to Friday Harbor and as a wildlife-viewing tour, so they had a naturalist on board pointing out the sights.

Here I am, looking cold with the bridge over Deception Pass in the background (it was gray and chilly the morning we set out).



Friday Harbor is a little tourist town with an extensive marina. We arrived around lunchtime and our kayak trip didn’t start until the next day, so we had time to wander around the docks. On the path to the marina, we saw a life-sized granite sculpture of a harbor seal in a playful pose.


Only one of the eyes contained a shell inlay, so I thought the sculpture had been vandalized.


Then, when we got down to the docks, this little guy popped up to the surface.



He hung out right there next to the floating dock where we were standing for a minute or so while we watched him and talked to him. Turns out he’s known as Popeye, the one-eyed resident harbor seal, and the supposedly vandalized sculpture was really a tribute to him.

The next morning, we met our guide from Outdoor Odysseys and the three other kayak trip guests. David took this misty, moody picture of the Washington State Ferry at the Friday Harbor dock while we were waiting for the group to gather.


Our guide’s name was Chris; she was around thirty years old, originally from Massachusetts, cheerful and low-key — a good personality for an outdoor guide. She’s been doing seasonal work around the West Coast for a couple of years and loving it. Here she is on the last day of the trip, with a friend she picked up.

We all hopped in the van and drove from Friday Harbor across to the west side of San Juan Island to Small Pox Bay, which was to be our launching point.

We had a brief lesson in paddling and loaded up the kayaks with everything we would need for three days. It is amazing how much stuff you can fit into a double kayak. We had three double kayaks for the six of us, into which we fit all our personal gear (clothing, toiletries, etc.), sleeping bags for all, four tents, a full-sized two-burner camp stove, a gallon tank of propane, a heavy cast-iron Dutch oven, a couple of boxes of wine, a big box of produce, and around eight rectangular, lidded plastic buckets containing more than enough food for six people for seven meals. Here I am with our loaded kayak.


Chris said, “Now, don’t freak out, because it sounds like a really long distance, but we’ll be paddling 12.7 miles today. It’s our longest day of the trip.” Yikes! Fortunately I had my big engine (David) in the back of my kayak. We paddled along the western shore of San Juan Island and north through Mosquito Pass (a narrow passage through numerous small islands) until we stopped at tiny, uninhabited Posey Island for lunch. After lunch, we encountered the toughest part of the route, the crossing of Spieden Channel, a wide channel where the current happened to be against us. As a reward, though, we were granted a great sighting of a small pod of Dall’s porpoises. The water was so still and the air so quiet that not only could we see them as they swam by us, but we could clearly hear them breathing out and in.

Eventually we made it to our destination, the northeast side of Stuart Island, to the state campground there. We would be base camping for two nights. Here’s our campsite the first morning; note the water like glass.

Next: Exploring Stuart Island.

(All photos by David.)