Haro Strait

Saturday morning, we loaded 3 boats onto his car, and took off to San Juan Island. The plan was to dump our gear at the WWTA site at San Juan County Park, drive the car & kayaks to Snug Harbour, pay $5 for overnight parking, then paddle back down to SJ Park - since it's a WWTA site, SJ Park does not let us park there overnight. Surprise #1: new owners at Sung Harbour don't do that anymore and have plans to rip those cute little cottages out and build time-share condos and make it all private.

We contacted the lovely, intelligent marine biologist & paddler/boat-builder extraordinaire, Eva, who has spent the last 4 weeks at Friday Harbour Laboratories, studying those weird squiggly things in the water - Peter thinks it's all classified as "pond scum". Since we also brought her boat over with us so she could paddle too, we conned her into our plan of parking our car in-town, then driving us back to the campsite later.

By this time it was 3PM-ish and we would meet Eva around 5:30-ish, so Peter & I did a paddle down to Lime-kiln point.

Later, we hooked up with Eva, and had dinner & beer at crab-house. Then, Eva invited us to a party of some sorts back at the laboratories....but it was a costume party....a specific kind of costume party....an invertebrate costume party....uh....ok....and we had to dress up, too...."Peter, we should just walk the 12 miles back to camp now, OK?"

I have to say, I will never forget that night, or the images I saw. I'm really not sure at this point whether that night was real, or I just dreamed it, but I think Peter took a lot of pictures - maybe he'll post them and we'll see if that night really happened.

The next day, Eva met us at the park for the paddle. While we were readying gear & boats, the Orca pods started passing by, heading north. We launched and paddled with probably 20-30 Orca for about an hour, until they threw it in high and left us. We continued our paddle north in Haro Strait. The winds were out of the south, 10-15knts, and we were riding the flood, so we had following waves of 1-2, some places we were getting 3 feet near the rips - pretty exciting and we all handled the conditions great. We cruised around the NW side of Berry and hauled out on a pebble beach for lunch. Then we continued up around the tip of Berry and timed it about right for the ebb
to start. We rode that back through Roche Harbour, down Mosquito Passage, and back into Haro Strait for the final leg back to the park. Head winds were pretty unrelenting, but we kept up an average of 3knts.

We loaded the boats , drove to Eva's labs, let her & her boat off and went to the ferry line. Surprise #2: there was a backlog of people from the morning ferry, and getting there 2 hours early wouldn't have got us on the 5PM ferry - they were filling the ferries 3 hours in advance - that's not the norm for Friday Harbour.

Since we had plenty of time, we decided to check out the sites. Peter wanted a cup of coffee and so set off in search of one. Surprise #3: almost NOBODY has drip coffee in Friday Harbour - it's all the espresso/latte-scene. He found one in a store, but the lines were 15-20 minutes long. He finally found his coffee after about 5 tries. After that, we grab a few beers at Front Street Ale house, then walked across the street for and some seafood. Surprise #4: the nice seafood restaurant on the water front informed us after we sat down they were out of all types of beer except Guinness & Stella Artois, and were out of Mussels, clams, and maybe one of the fish. We got up and left.

We tried another place we saw the day before, but they were closed.

We finally settled on that outdoor crab-house overlooking the ferry docks. We got our mussels, and a beer. By this time, it was 6:30 and here came our ferry. Things were looking up!

We arrived back at my place at 9:30PM, tired, trashed, but satisfied. Peter kept saying he hates the SJ's - I can see what he means now.

- Trip report by Jay