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Deception Pass has currents that can exceed seven knots, so you need to be there precisely at slack to avoid excitement. When we checked the weather forecast that night, they were calling for high winds the next day (35 – 55 knots), with the storm arriving around 3:00 PM. Slack water was at 1:48 PM, which would only leave us around an hour to find a campsite on the other side of the pass before the weather turned. When we got up, the ebb tide was already flowing at three knots toward the pass, so we rode the current over to Coronet Bay and asked around for campsites that would get us out of the wind. We decided go through the pass and swing into the state park on the north side. We pulled in and had our tent set up just as the rain started to come down a little after 3:00.
With the forecast for winds above 20 knots the next day as well, I called Crane, a friend of mine from Seattle who grew up in Anacortes, to see if he had ideas for how we could get the ten miles into town to finish our grocery shopping. He called his dad, and his dad was nice enough to drive out and pick us up the next day. Chuck and his wife Jan were awesome. They let us wash our clothes and take showers, then watched lil’bit while we went shopping for groceries. One of our friends from Anchorage, Zach, was flying down to paddle with us for two weeks. Once he showed up we stuffed ourselves at the pub then caught a cab back to the campsite and watched Zach put his folding kayaking together.
After we left Deception Pass with Zach, we paddled north to Strawberry Island. It was supposed to be a water trails campsite, but it was pretty hard to find, and didn’t look like it was still supported. We camped out on a bluff with a western view over the water. The madrone trees, wild flowers, rocks, seals, and sunset were much nicer than the waterfront homes and towns we had been paddling past the previous week.
The last big step of this part of the trip was to cross Haro Straight to get to Sidney, where we had to clear Canadian customs. They were forecasting winds in the afternoon, so we got an early start to cross over to Spieden Island, then to Stuart Island, and then finally across Haro Straight. When we got to the protection of the Islands off Sidney the wind started to blow and the current really started to run. As we rounded Forest Island, the current was flowing like a river. At first we tried to stay in the bay to paddle up to downtown Sidney, but the current suggested we drop back behind a line of small rock islands, which was much calmer paddling and sailing.
After we got to the customs dock we tied up the boats and headed to town to get the last of our supplies and take a day off.
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