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Sea Kayak Trips Bulletin Board
Goat Island
Posted By: Shawn Baker / Pete Roszyk
Date: Friday, 30 July 1999, at 5:53 p.m.
I took off from Larry and Sue's at 8:15am so that I could have time to deal with the rush-hour traffic on I-5. I had to go to West Marine first, though, to swap for a compass that pointed north! Luckily, the Bellingham store would do the exchange for me so that I wouldn't have to drive through Seattle to find the other store and do the swap. I didn't realize how easy it would be for me to get lost in the relatively small city of Bellingham, but I did. Anyhow, I got the compass traded out and took off for LaConner. I got there at 10:15, just 15 minutes late-not bad after having been lost-and met Pete Roszyk. We looked at the pictures of his pickup and strip-built topper that got munched in a rear-end accident two weeks ago. It looked like a real bummer, but he figured he would be able to bring it back to beautiful like-new condition again. I also looked over his Pygmy Coho-he did a remarkable job of sanding and finishing it. I was a bit embarassed as I got impatient to paddle during my last varnish coat, and had a few sags and holidays that I ought to sand out. He really did a nice job mounting his flush hatches with the interior pulley hold-down system, and his recessed compass mount was nice.
We paddled south down the Swinomish Channel and out the jetty. It was an absolutely gorgeous day. We had some motor-yacht wakes to play on on the way out, and Pete even surfed a couple. We got out of the channel and rounded the point of the jetty and out into Skagit Bay. It was low tide and flooding, so we had to search to find a deep enough channel to paddle up to the island. Needless to say, we were there a bit too close to low tide and we both ran aground on sand bars several times. We got about halfway to the island and got hung up about the same time, so we just sat there and talked boats for about 20 minutes and waited for about 3-4 more inches of water to come in. As we neared the island, we noticed a seal sunning itself on a sandbar. I'm sure we were a lot closer than 200 yards away (per the Marine Mammal Protection Act), but I didn't even notice the guy until we were even with him. It was pretty humorous, as the seal wanted to swim away, but was in the same shallow stuff we were in. He flopped and flipped about 10' before hitting a deeper spot and swimming away. We paddled on to Goat Island. There is an old fort on the island that was placed so that a foreign navy couldn't invade the Puget Sound without a fight. It was abandoned around WWII because aircraft became a more efficient means of defense. Neither Pete nor I noticed the fort, but we didn't want to go paddling (er, poling) around too close to the island since it was damn shallow closer ashore.
We pulled into a nice little cove on the south side of Goat, and hopped out for a stretch. I borrowed Pete's Coho for a quick paddle around the small bay. I really enjoyed how it felt and responded to leaned turns. It felt a lot more maneuverable than the Chesapeake, but still tracked well enough to not be uncomfortably "loose". Pete didn't have knee hooks, so I didn't attempt a roll.
We got in our own boats and continued on around the island. When we reached the east side, there was a pretty serious eddy out off a small point; we crossed it and coasted downstream with the current for awhile before paddling up-current to a little fish hole in the jetty. The fish-hole was left in the Jetty for migrating salmon that missed the Swinomish Channel and still needed to get upstream to spawn. The fish-hole was about 12 feet wide with a couple of random-sized riprap boulders along the right edge. We set our boats down on a little sandbar and walked up to scout a way to walk around. I snapped a picture to show that CLC and Pygmy boats can be friends. We carried Pete's boat around, and I started getting tempted to run down the chute in my boat. There was probably about 6-700 cfs flowing down it, and enough room to clear the boulders on the right side, but there was a submerged rock on the left side at the top that would have made a mistake in judgement result in, well, fuzzy fiberglass and torn okoume. So, I tied my tow rope to the stern grab loop and let the boat go down without me, and just pretended that I was in the boat. Without my weight, the boat easily cleared the submerged rock, so it made judging whether or not I could have paddled the chute tough.
Hopped back in the boats and surfed yacht wakes back up the channel.
We hauled the boats out and visited a bit more and headed up the road.
Est. Distance: 7.5 miles; 3.5 hours
Shawn
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