The gray predawn light crept in past the edges of my tarp.
It was 5 a.m.. I was too wired to get back to sleep. Time to get up and move the old body.
My plan to kayak back to Port Angeles was a leisurely one. I wanted to take my time and enjoy some scenery, poke in and out of coves along the way.
There were a couple of trails nearby that I wanted to check out. The Lyre River is supposed to be a common place for Roosevelt Elk. I hiked around for about forty-minutes. There was one meadow that looked like the kind of place where elk would frolic on a dewy morning — but no dice.
That was OK. I still had breakfast to look forward to. I had a savory meal of oatmeal mixed with spinach and parsley with fresh sliced mango, drizzled over with soy sauce. If you just imagine that the oatmeal is pasta or barley, the meal makes a lot of sense.
Plus the color scheme was pleasing in an Instagram-y kind of way. I hung my damp clothes to dry in the sun and thought of hashtags I could use to describe this morning idyll:
#mylifeofleisureisworthmorethanyourlifewhereyouworkforthings; #Thesunshiningthroughmyfacialhairistrancendental; #thisisprettybuttrumpisstillpresident; #namebrandgearinthisphotoaffirmsmyvalue; #neveruncomfortableoutdoors; #youcouldtrytotapintothedeepwellofmeaningthattheoutdoorsgivesmebutwouldprobablyfail.
Actually, I suck at writing hashtags.
My pseudo Asian-fusion breakfast went down well with a slug of hot chocolate. The sun was warm already, and the gear that I had put out had mostly dried. It was time to hit the water.
Getting off the beach was going to be a little more challenging now that the tide had gone out. The river channel I had paddled up the night before was all shallow cobbles now. It was more than a 100 yards to get to water deep enough to launch into. I ended up using the bow line to clip the boat to my life vest and walked down the middle of the river with the boat bobbing in front of me. The cobbles were covered with green slime, which made for tricky footing, but also protected the bottom of the boat from scratches. I walked most of the way down to the river mouth before I got into the cockpit.
This time, there was barely any chop where the river met the sea. Neither was there any wind, only a slow bobbing swell. I was already warm in my drysuit.
That’s when I got the Idea. I should roll my kayak over, get soaked, and be cool from the start.
After all, the boat was close to shore. And when was the last time that I’d botched a roll in calm water? (2015, if you don’t count my recent radar reflector experiment) Well, timing is a funny thing.
I went over on my right side, planning to barrel over to to my left and pop back to the surface, like I’d done hundreds of times in the past. I hit the water with a sigh of refreshment. OK, time to get to the other side and come back up. I couldn’t. My body wouldn’t move under the boat.
The problem was buoyancy. My new drysuit had a lot of air trapped in it, so did the dry bag with equipment that I had attached to my life vest.
Each time I tried to get my body to the other side of my boat, I only managed to bump the kayak up on the right side. The harder I tried, the more I moved my kayak. Finally, I tried to roll onto my right side. It’d been a while since I’d practiced. I managed to get my head up for a gulp of air, then plunged back down. I shifted the paddle for a “failsafe” Pawlata role, but I was too shaky. Down I went again. I yanked hard on my skirt and bobbed up next to the boat, gasping.
Well, shit. Looks like my day wasn’t off to such an amazing start after all. #noobmove.
I flipped the boat back over. It had a lot of water in it.
Still, I was a balanced guy. I could climb back into it, no problemo. I managed to throw my chest up onto the back deck and was just getting my feet back into the boat when it decided to roll over again, dumping me back into the water.
No panic. The drysuit kept me perfectly warm in the cold sea. Clearly, I had to pump some water out of the boat before effortlessly getting back into it like the rockstar paddler that I am. Meanwhile, I noticed my deck compass had come detached, and was drifting away on the current. No big deal. I’d pick it up once I got back into the kayak.
After I had pumped about half the water from the boat, I decided that this was all that was necessary for my abilities to effect an effective rescue. Problem: Every time I tried to push my body up onto the boat, I pushed it down again and it filled with more water. The bulky size of my rescue vest made it especially difficult to swing myself up in one slick move. I was also beginning to feel strangely nauseas in the bobbing waves. Seasickness is something that almost never happens to me in a kayak. Unfortunately, I was in my kayak no longer.
I put the paddle float on one end of my paddle, and used it to support myself on my way back into the boat. The fragile balance lasted a second, then I went over again.
I thought about swimming back to shore with the kayak and getting back in there, but that would be squandering a learning opportunity. Finally, I just got to work with the bilge pump and spent several minutes pumping most of the water out of the boat. I had to throw my weight up far in the back to avoid sinking the cockpit. This time, I got in successfully. I was totally seasick though. The compass was no longer in sight. More goddamn plastic trash in the ocean. The slick new sea knife that I had used to chop mango that morning was another gift I’d made to Davy Jones.
I needed to get off the water. I pulled the boat up on some slime rocks where I sat down, feeling like a massive idiot. It took about 20 minutes for my guts to straighten out, time I spent watching crabs crawl in and out of the seaweed. Black oystercatchers probed the barnacles for tasty morsels with their orange beaks. Even the sound of the waves breaking tended to make me nauseous. Nor did the hot sun on my drysuit help.
I dumped the rest of the water out of my boat, pushed off into the salt water. As I paddled out, I found my guts going back into weird places. The small amount of sleep I’d received the night before was catching up also. I found myself closing my eyes at random times and stopping paddling. I was supposed to have a nice flood current behind me, but the boat barely seemed to move.
Finally, hardly a mile after I launched, I pulled my boat back up on some rocks, got out and climbed to the top of a boulder where I fell asleep.
That was the best decision I made all day.
I was mindful that the tide was coming in, and had my boat at least three feet above the water where it would take a couple hours for the water to reach. As an extra caution, I ran a rope from my life vest to the kayak bow and then used the life vest for a pillow.
I conked out for about an hour. By the time that I awoke, the water had almost reached the kayak.
I climbed down off the boulder and started paddling anew.
I made sure to belch a bunch of air out of my drysuit, then I used a small carabiner to stop my dry bag on my life vest from swinging around. This would hopefully be enough to prevent any more buoyancy crises. I wasn’t about to try another roll and find out.
The rock gardens beneath the cliffs were too tempting to turn down however. The building swells made for some exhilarating turns through the rocks.
I rode the building current across Freshwater Bay to the Elwha river mouth. Viewed from the sea, I could tell the breakers were big — bigger than they had been the day before. A dark figure in the water turned out to be a surfer in a full-body wetsuit, waiting for waves to come in.
I decided to swing closer and say hello. Historically, kayakers and surfers have not always played well together around the breaks, but I was determined to put my best paddle forward. Yeah, they probably think they are better than us because they have to stand on their boards while we just sit there. Still, I wonder how many of them would appreciate the work that goes into a good high brace or a roll. After we exchanged greetings, I pointed the bow at the river mouth. The wave behind me reared up suddenly. It was well above my head — a wall of blue. The back of the kayak rose up — It was 45 degrees. I started bracing right. No, let’s go left.
I leaned hard left with my blade in the water. Too late.
The wave exploded into froth. It blasted me over on my right side. Then I was underwater in a noisy thrash festival.
My first thought was, aw man, I just made myself look like a noob.
Then I forced my body down to the other side of the kayak. I placed the paddle blade and swept it through the foam with my hips snapping.
I was right side up and in the air again! I suddenly realized that the kayak was still moving sideways. I was, in fact, still surfing. There was a frothing white dragon on my left side I leaned in with my paddle and flew over the water — a wild whoop leaving my lungs.
The dragon spent its strength against the river current, then sank beneath the water. I paddled like mad, veering left, then right. Another wave took me further upriver. I pulled onto some beach cobbles to eat a soggy Clif Bar.
Holy Hell that was fun! Definitely the coolest roll that I’ve pulled off in this lifetime. It was the perfect antidote to the morning’s disappointment. If I hadn’t messed up that first roll, I probably wouldn’t have made the changes I’d needed to land it when it counted.
I thought about spending more time surfing, landing sweet rides. Yet, something told me that I should quit on a winning hand.
Shooting back out through the breakers was a nail biter anyhow. I punched through the froth, climbed a blue wall, took a final boof stroke right before the sucker dropped to pieces beneath me and my nose crashed several feet into the trough behind it. Further on, the waves rounded. I saw the first surfer catch a fast ride on the next wave. To the northeast there was another guy on a board, though he seemed a bit further from the break zone then I would have expected.
“How you doing, Man?”
“Not too bad,” the guy said. “That current is pretty strong out here isn’t it.” He was playing it cool, but I could hear some strain in his voice. It sounded the way I sound when I’m cold, nervous or both.
I frowned.
“You want a tow back to shore?” I asked.
“Sure, if you can.”
“This’ll be a great opportunity to build good will between kayakers and surfkind,” I said. I felt no small amount of pride stepping into the benevolent helper role.
“Hey, we all share the water,” he said.
I tossed him the throwline I had clipped to the lifevest and started paddling.
“This has been such a great day!” I said. “I kinda thought it was gonna suck, because I screwed up my roll this morning, but,man, you should have seen the wave I caught earlier. That was the coolest ride…”
I looked back to make sure he was still attached and listening to my story.
The waves were getting sharper as we got closer to shore.
“Hey. If we start surfing together, you’ll probably want to let go of that rope,” I said.
Sure enough, a big blue beast picked me up. The surfer let go and started boogieing toward the sand. I rode the foam, started to turn out of mayhem, but was too slow. The next breaker blasted me sideways toward shore. It dropped me straight down onto the wet sand, leaving me to jump out of the boat and drag it up the beach before the next monster came in.
I saw that the surfer had made it to shore also. He started walking toward where he’d launched from.
I turned back to the sea. Getting back into the water was going to be tough. It took at least 20 minutes. Every time, I tried to get into the waves, they would rock me sideways and toss me back onto the beach before I could get my skirt on. The biggest waves came in sets so that the first one would mess up my angle, and I wouldn’t dare paddle into the second one off kilter. The other waves were too small to reach my kayak. I was so frustrated I almost dragged the boat back to the river mouth. I leaned my boat against each backwash, and pivoted into the sand for all I was worth. Finally, I found the wave I wanted and paddled for it.
I barely avoided getting blasted back to the beach. The tidal current was going full bore now, and I was able to surf waves back toward Ediz Hook. The seas were getting rowdier by the minute. The washing machine was waiting for me at the east end of the Hook.
I could avoid it if I portaged the Hook’s south end near the paper mill.
Problem was, I’d have to haul my boat over a riprap sea wall. There would also be a landing on a cobble beach in big waves. Once I got past those obstacles, I would have easy downwind/down-current paddling in Port Angeles Harbor.
Back at the paper mill, I looked for a possible landing spot among the surf-battered cobbles. The beach was incredibly steep. I timed my entry on the back of a wave and jumped out of the boat. I was swam next to the kayak, hustled into shore and pulled up on the bow rope as the next wave crashed in. It took another 15 minutes to haul the boat up over the rocks. I used the bow rope to hold the boat in place while I moved around for purchase. I dug the sleeping mat back out to cushion the boat bottom from the sharp stones.
I hauled the whole rig over the Ediz Hook Road to the beach on the other side. The water in the west end of the harbor was barely ruffled. Two paddlers in long sleeve shirts bobbed among the log booms. It was only a couple miles of paddling back to my car. Another couple was walking down the beach with their dog. They wandered over to my boat to say hello.
“Are you going out or coming in?” the man asked.
“Both.” I said.