[Paddlewise] Anacortes-Friday Harbor night trip (long)

(I'm dropping back in after a couple years' gap to
post a report of a weird trip.)

Paddling from Anacortes to Friday Harbor, WA via the
south side of Lopez Island is one of my favorite
trips, which I'd previously done 5 times in the past 4
years.  The map-distance is about 25 miles, but
choosing a date near the full or new moon give
following currents most of the way, making the
effective distance about 1/3 less.  The scenery of
long crossings, wide vistas and weathered rock is
spectacular and varied, and Cattle Pass at the south
entrance to San Juan Channel contains some interesting
hydraulics at 3.5 to 4 knot currents even when winds
are light.  Wildlife viewing, particulary seabirds, is
also typically excellent.

This is usually done as a day trip, catching the ferry
back to Anacortes in the early evening, but I've also
tried stopping to camp either about 2 miles before
reaching Friday Harbor on Turn Island, or continuing
up San Juan Channel about 8 miles past Friday Harbor
to Jones Island.  

After my second run of the route, I started to
consider doing it by moonlight.  My night paddling on
salt water was primarily limited to short excursions
near campsites to view bioluminescense (which IMHO is
about the best thing about sea kayaking!) and a
moonlit run of about 7 miles from Clark Is. to Doe
Is., and I was eager to do more night-time playing.

Being an idiot, it took me a while to understand that
the big tides under the full moon occur only in the
winter half of the year, presumably due mostly to the
inclination of the ecliptic, so pulling this stunt
during the summer wasn't practical unless one was
willing to forego most of the current assist.  Due to
Washington's generally crummy winter weather, and the
birth of a now-over-two-year-old daughter not long
after I finally figured out the tidal situation, it's
been almost 3 years since I started scheming to do
this (with a few missed opportunities due to poor
foresight).  

The unusually nice weather this winter (if you don't
like lawn watering or river kayaking), had my hopes
raised, and a persistant ridge of high pressure over
the NE Pacific elevated them further last week.  I
recruited one of the usual suspects as a partner for
Feb. 14 or 15, but by Monday the long range forecast
was not looking favorable, so out of desperation we
moved the date up to Wednesday and took a few hours
off work.

Hitting the freeway out of Seattle a bit before 3:00
PM, we reached the beach at Washington Park a little
before 5:00.  Sunset and peak ebb current in Rosario
Strait were both at 5:25, which we missed due to my
usual inefficiency while organizing my gear.  Finally
got on the water at 5:55, which was fine, but it would
have been nice to catch a few more minutes of the
sunset.  A few shreds of cloud still glowed
beautifully red off near the Olympic mountains and
somewhere beyond Victoria, BC.  A nice fringe-benefit
of starting early, worth the loss of "pure" moonlight
paddling claims.

The disadvantage was that the sky-glow reflected on
the water would make our lights less noticeable to any
big, fast traffic in Rosario Strait, such as tankers
serving the oil terminals at Marsh Pt. and Cherry Pt. 
Fortunately, this threat failed to materialize, so the
VHF radios stayed off.  

On my Mariner II, I have a tri-color setup using
LED-Light brand flashlights, with the white light
lashed (or, more often, duct-taped) to a line on my
rear deck and the red and green mounted on a white,
T-shaped lightboard held by my foredeck bungies.  This
would be almost ideal, but I can't recommend this
brand of lights.  The LED housings fit too loosely and
have to be unscrewed too far to shut off the light, so
that I'm surprised they have survived even the limited
saltwater exposure they've seen so far.  The white
light came completely unscrewed and fell apart after
boarding the ferry when a minute's rummaging around in
my rear compartment caused it to rub against my hatch
cover a few times.  I expect I will have to replace
these with the far more reliably waterproof
PrincetonTec brand in the not too distant future,
though I may be able to refit them with some thicker
O-ring seals to at least partly solve the problem.  

I also had a small PrincetonTec white light tethered
to my PFD pocket as a backup, and we each had an
activated chemical glowstick leashed to our PFDs and
tucked away out of sight.  On his Mariner Express,
Todd mounted a large, overly bright, white bicycle
headlamp on his foredeck and a flashing red bicycle
taillamp on his rear deck, which was not exactly ideal
(or legal), but did make his boat very obvious from
any quarter.

Some lights seen far to the north in Rosario Strait
soon moved south, and were somewhat mysterious until a
distant diesel drone suggested that they belonged to
either a big, unladen tug or a medium-large fishing
vessel.  Confusingly, no colored position lights could
be seen until the boat had closed to maybe a little
over a mile.  Apparently the green light was lost in
the glare of the brighter white lights, since about
the same time a more distant white light with a
trailing green light was interpreted to be a smaller
tug with a barge whose green light could be seen
easily due to a lack of brighter lights on the barge. 
All this was made harder to judge due to their
position right off sterns most of the time, but FAR
more so due to little experience watching shipping
from right on the water.   The lack of the perspective
given by some elevation is impressively confusing,
even in an area like this with relatively few lights
on shore.  

With max. ebb at only 2.3 knots (about 1 knot lower
than usual for this trip) and virtually imperceptible
wind, the extensive tide rip typically encountered E
of Bird Rk. was instead a barely perceptable stirring
of the water.  Initially, we could easily see Bird Rk.
sillouetted against the water, but just after our
closest approach to them, the rocks become invisible
as the sky darkened and we moved south of the rocks,
even though there was still enough light on the water
to see all the larger islands.  

After passing this area, we were out of the expected
route of any large vessel traffic, and so doused our
lights so we could get better dark-adapted and enjoy
the view.  The town of Port Townsend is certainly an
over-achiever in the light pollution department!  
Despite this and the bright moon, the Milky Way was
easily visible overhead near Cassiopiea,  the Big
Dipper and Orion were striking in the north and south,
Cygnus was setting behind Lopez and Leo rising behind
us over Anacortes.  The Plieades were almost directly
above our course, but too high to make a very good
steering reference.   No bioluminescense could be
seen, so our attention stayed above the waterline. 
Though the full moon was three nights away, the
moonlight was bright enough that my deck clearly
appeared yellow, and we easily kept each other in
sight at distances up to 50 yards.

Frequent jet noise (but no aircraft lights) from
Whidbey Island Naval Air Station made me wonder if a
squadron was shipping out for the Bush War, or if they
were just training.

By 7:15, we landed for a brief break on a beach at Pt.
Colville, then continued through the weak opposing
current eddying south of the point.  Algae-fuzzed Bull
Kelp stalks rising to the surface looked spookily
unfamiliar in the moonlight.  A seal, presumably,
growled from a rock on the shore of Lopez at one
point, but we managed not to panic any wildlife in
this area, as far as we could tell.  Thin, scattered
clouds began to form in all quarters, blowing rapidly
under the stars. As the lights of Victoria came into
few, visible moisture in the air raised the specter of
the forecast possibility of fog, which encourages us
to make our stop at Iceberg Pt. shorter than usual,
from about 8:30 to 8:50.  As we started toward San
Juan Channel, I hung my glowstick on the back of my
PFD, and Todd turned on his red rear light, so we
would have a good balance of visibility from behind in
case another boat overtook us, ease of keeping track
of each other, and not wrecking our night-vision or
putting distracting lights in our forward fields of
view that might make it hard to see hydraulic
features.. 

Since the area was rather familiar, we hadn't bothered
to memorize the locations of the navigation lights, or
the smaller rocks and islets.  Approaching the pass
from a different gap in the islets than my last couple
of trips, I found it rather difficult to determine
exactly where ahead the pass would be until we could
actually see through it.  Of course, it's hard not to
be sucked down the drain in a place like this, but it
would be nice to know what's coming.  I vaguely recall
a similar confusion from my first trip, but found it a
bit more disconserting due to the limited light, which
greatly reduced the distance at which current features
could be seen.

However, the reality turned out to be an anti-climax. 
We entered the gut about 9:45, with peak flood not
until 11:30.  The predicted current by Xtide was 2.5
knots, and it was like a different place than at 3.5+.
 Except the worst rip outside the west edge of the
pass (audible but far off our course), the water was
silent, flat and barely stirring.  A few weak boils
nudged us, but nothing that really required any
response.  The weather never kicked in either, with no
fog except a low cloud far away beside Orcas Is., and
the clouds never reaching more than 20% of the sky
thinly covered.

After a brief rafted snack, we continued north,
arriving at Turn Is. about an hour ahead of schedule
at 11:00.  Unfortunately, at the last rock before
Turn, we put a bit of tarnish on our good citizenship
medals by stampeding about a half dozen previously
invisible seals into the water.

The island's campsites were predictably deserted. 
With sleeping bags deployed and alarm clock
programmed, we got about 4 hours of sleep before
jumping up at 4:00, popping on our sprayskirts 40
minutes later, and chasing the almost-set moon into
Friday Harbor.  After the hardest part of the trip
(climbing out and hoisting the boats onto the rather
high dock), we wheeled into the ferry loading area
with about 25 minutes to spare before the 6:00 sailing
back to Anacortes, Seattle, and a barely-shortened day
of work.

Lessons learned:

1.  Navigation by moonlight is hard, since you may not
be able to tell even if a shore a mile away is
forested or grassy, or otherwise see detail that you
expect to be familiar.  Reading the chart is also
hard, inconvenient, and damaging to your valuable
dark-adaption.  Study the charts MUCH harder than
usual before the trip, memorizing the position of
prominent landmarks and lights, even if you think you
know the area.  In unfamilar areas or those with vague
landmarks, a GPS would seem a lot less excessive than
usual.

2.  Interpretation of lights is hard.  Take a couple
of long looks at the scene before starting into an
area expected to have traffic, so you are confident if
any of the lights are moving, and repeat at
appropriate intervals.  Don't assume that red/green
position lights will be obvious on other vessels.

3.  Hydraulic challenges are magnified in low light. 
We didn't really even have any, but it's clear from
the tiny effects we did encounter that it's harder to
see what the water is doing in time to anticipate your
reaction.  Start back down the difficulty scale quite
a bit from what you are used to and see how it goes.

4.  Moonlight paddling rocks!  (OK, I already knew
that.)

Mike Wagenbach

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