The Beardslee Islands

Ian and I finally decided to do a kayaking trip on our own. We had done a couple with other people and we (mostly me) felt comfortable enough to be on our own. Instead of going up bay we we decided to to the Beardslee Islands. It is just a short hour kayak from the lodge to the entrance or "the cut". The route that we took is only accessible at high tide, because at low tide there are places where the land is completely dry. There is another entrance but that is a eight hour trip, jut to get in. 

Going through the cut itself, is beautiful. It is heavily forested on both sides, and the withe of the channel was about a quarter of a mile. Even though it was high tide, we still had to watch out of massive boulders that lay just under the surface of the water.

Once you get through the cut, then there are numerous low-lying islands, some with trees and heavy brush and some that are almost barren. We took our time just paddling from one shore to another hoping to see some wildlife. Not too long after we got there we came upon a female moose and her baby. We paddled close to shore and just watched them graze. The female would look up at us every once in a while but then would return to grazing, realizing that we weren't a threat. The baby on the other had could not concentrate on eating, because quite often it would look at us and you could tell that we made it nervous. 

After a few hours of paddling the weather started to turn cold, so we decided to head to our campsite. It is a site that is regularly used by people who visit The Beardslee's. It is a giant rock that is semi-flat on the top. It is a good distance from shore, just at the start of the brush, and you climb up from the back. I really liked this spot because it gave you a complete 360 degree look of everything around. (The name Beardslee Island comes from the fact that are a lot of black bear sightings in this area).

After we set up camp, we wondered a little bit. We were camped near a cove so at low tide there was a lot to explore.

As we retired for the night it started to rain, and the wind picked up. It was sort of a miserable night. Just as you would start to fall asleep a especially strong gust of wind would hit the tent and you would be instantly on high alert. But the good news is that we have an amazing tent that kept us dry and warm even though it rained all night long.

The next morning as we were packing up I was looking for our bear canister (a hard plastic cylinder canister that a camper is to keep all food and anything with a scent, such as toothpaste in) WAS GONE. The rangers tell us to keep the canister 100 yards from your campsite nestled in the rocks above high tide, and that is what we always do, and IT WAS GONE. We looked around for a couple of minutes for it, but we both know that it was kind of hopeless. It was gone. The worst thing is that we borrow them from the visitor center but we had to pay $65 for it because we lost it. 

 

We had to work in the early afternoon so we had to head home as soon as possible. But of course we had to time it with high tide. There is a lot of logistics that go into the tides, most which are really interesting: The tide changes every 6 hours, and the tide is strongest 3 hours before the new tide. Coming into The Beardslee we had the tide on our side, but coming out the tide was going to be against us. Since the cut is not a very big channel, the flow of the water is much stronger. It was quite the experience. We went through the cut 2 hours before high tide, so the water was still moving very quickly into The Beardslee's. It was a little scary. Ian called it white water kayaking, which is a little bit of an exaggeration but kind of true. If at some point we both stopped paddling we would almost instantly come to a complete standstill and the current would start to carry us back the way we came. Plus, Ian had to really focus and be on the lookout for boulders that would cause the kayak really bad damage if we were to accidentally come into contact with.

We made it back alive, of course. And once again we were unlucky or lucky because we did not run into one bear while there. (Although it was probably a bear that took our bear canister.) Even though we were only a couple of hours away from the lodge, we were in a completely different world, and it was a great trip.