San Juan Islands kayak trip, Part 3: Art and nature, and a monster of a sailboat

After we ended our kayak trip at Roche Harbor, we had one more night and most of a day left on San Juan Island before catching the Clipper back to Seattle. There’s a shuttle bus that runs from Friday Harbor to various tourist destinations on San Juan Island, so on Friday the 5th we took the bus out to Lime Kiln Point and Whale Watching Park on the west side of the island. The park got its name from the fact that orcas can often be seen from the shore there, but they weren’t around when we were there.

Then we took another bus out to the Westcott Bay Sculpture Park near Roche Harbor on the north side of the island. The grounds are surprisingly extensive, with trails leading across a meadow and through stands of trees to sculptures of all kinds, some of them mysteriously tucked away among the reeds and grasses.

Here’s the main meadow.

This bronze sculpture depicts a turtle with a relief of Puget Sound in its back (“Turtle Island Puget Sound,” by Mark Stevenson).


This is “Treseder,” by Julie Speidel, which I liked for the way it plays with light and shadow, solids and negative space.


This is “Grape Leaf Gate” by Tom Torrens.


Here’s David with “Entry,” by Tom Small.


And a detail of the hummingbird on Paul Thorne’s “Hummingbird Gate.”


In the afternoon, after a late lunch of veggie burgers and beer at the Front Street Ale House back in Friday Harbor, it was time to board the Clipper. On the way back the captain slowed the vessel so we could get a good look at some sea lions hauled out on some rocks, and then we saw, first at a great distance and then up close, the BMW Oracle Racing 90 trimaran, which was out for one of her sea trials.


This sailboat is off the scale. She has a 158-foot mast and a 5,000 square-foot mainsail, is 100 feet long, and was built at an estimated cost of $10 million. Oracle’s Larry Ellison is trying to win a court decision that will allow him to race BMW Oracle Racing 90 in the 2010 America’s Cup. It seems like a pretty big gamble. Here’s a link to a Seattle Times story about it. After reading the story, I felt especially fortunate to have gotten a good look at the boat, since relatively few people got to see her while she was here.

And with that, our first full summer in Seattle officially came to a close. Sun, it’s been nice knowing you. See you next year.

(All photos by David.)