Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

A week or so back I made a start at a report on my August BC kayak trip . I've been out in the mountains, so not much chance to edit the photo and put together more posts, but I did get pictures from Day 3, which was one of our 2 longest paddling days, and the longest with fully-loaded boats--about 11.5 miles. We started the day at Red Point camp. I'm an early riser, so I got the pretty morning light, and a few whale-spouts (not shown). The tide was down, so there were some interesting critters left high and dry (like this anemone). Getting ready to launch Launching. All our launches involved wet feet. I found that my water shoes let water in, but not out--not the ideal set-up! We made a couple of stops along the way, first to look at the shell-mound midden on one island, then another for lunch at a beach that was disappearing fast while we ate! Lunch stop. Looking out from lunch. Later we stopped at Village Island, a historic site run by the First Nations people. Visits are by...

I'm making only one promise about this trip report: it's going to take a while to get to the end, because I'm heading out for more adventures and have no expectation of getting all the photos edited, let alone posts created, before I leave. August 9-14 (actually 8-15 counting the trip up and back), two friends and I joined a small group kayaking adventure out of Port McNeill, BC, to the Broughton Archipelago. The trip started, for me, with a rendezvous at my house at 7:30 a.m. to drive to the ferry in Canada. We gave ourselves tons of time for the border crossing, which in fact took only about 5 minutes. I wasn't taking chances--we had a ferry to catch. I don't take a lot of photos of ferries, but this line in the water was particularly striking. It's the flow from the Fraser River refusing to mingle with the waters of the Salish Sea. After the 2 hour ferry ride, we had another 4 hour drive to Pt. McNeill--it really is a long way from anywhere! In the evening th...

Way back at the end of July, a couple of friends and I joined a guided kayak trip to the Sucia Island Marine State Park (San Juan Islands, Washington). The tour was run by Anacortes Kayak Tours , which did a fantastic job. Note on the photography: many of these shots were done with my iPhone 15 Pro Max, which does a very good job, for a phone. I didn't want to take a good camera onto the salt water, so the rest are shot on a long-retired Panasonic Lumix point-and-shoot, as the one of my old cameras with the longest zoom. It was not without issues.  Since the meet-up time was 9 a.m. on Orcas Island, we drove up and took the ferry to Orcas the day before. That gave us time to poke around the island a bit and get a seafood dinner. We camped at Moran State Park (it turned out that all the members of our tour did that, though of course we didn't know each other then and were in different campgrounds). As it happened, the morning ferry was 45 minutes late, so we all hung out at the b...