A collection of photography and exploration focusing on Upstate South Carolina and beyond.
I mentioned this in a previous post. Kayaking at Samish island can be tricky. Tide and weather have to be in agreement. Tuesday morning the tides were perfect, with high tide at 11:30 am. However, the weather wasn’t so great. A heavy fog had rolled in. I was seeing patches of blue overhead and knew that it would burn off eventually, so I loaded up the boat and headed over to Duff’s beach cabin for a foggy paddling trip.
It looked like I wasn’t going to get to go paddling this trip. I had thought about just buying a kayak and leaving it up here for future trips, but couldn’t find anything reasonable. I thought about booking another tour, but by that time most had filled up with holiday travelers.
Fortunately, the neighbor Duff came to my rescue. He had several homemade Fiberglas boats that we had used before, but they weren’t easy to reach. They were at the bottom of the cliff on the south side of the island. We managed to haul them up the cliff, but by that time it was late in the evening, and we were a bit tired from the haul to go paddling.
After discussing options we decided to take the boats up the Valley and run a section of the Skagit River. This was something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, so I was psyched. We loaded the boats onto our rental, since it had roof racks.
The next morning Duff and I headed out in two vehicles. We had barely gotten off the island when one of the boats came loose and slid off of my car. Fortunately there was no damage to car or boat, and we were able to get it loaded back on an limp home. However, we needed to regroup.