The next morning, Craig drove us and all of our back to Mariners Cove. I borrowed a little WD-40 to help lubricate the lock on the kayak cables and gave the lock a spin to get it working. It had stuck the day before and I wanted to get any sand or grit out of the lock. Craig drove off and we waived good-bye. I started spinning the lock to open the cables and discovered that the WD-40 hadn’t helped, if anything it made it harder to to grip the spindle. The combo didn’t work the first time, but I thought that was just because of my slippery fingers. I tried again – no luck. I tried a third time – still no luck. Giovannina tried. She tried again. And again. After about ten times trying to open the lock we came to the conclusion that it was not going to open. It dawned on us that our kayaks were now permanently attached to a park bench.
We considered knocking on someone’s door, asking for a pair of bolt cutters or an angle grinder, but this looked like the kind of a neighborhood where such a request would probably be followed by visit from the sheriff. So we worked on a Plan B. Our friend Omar had recommended we buy a big knife for this trip to baton wood and make kindling (Cool fact – when you make kindling with a knife, it’s called batonning.) I never found the right knife, but I did find a badass hatchet shaped like a cleaver. It looked like something out of a horror movie. One swift swing and it split that cable like an artery in a slasher flick.
The rest of the day proved to be, thankfully, uneventful. The fog lifted, the air warmed and a southerly breeze and small current pushed us along for most of our journey. We had intended to camp at Hope Island, but other kayakers had recommended Skagit Island, and boy were they right. Nothing wrong with Hope Island – reminds me a lot of Blake, but a bit smaller – but Skagit is sublime. A postage stamp of an island, located a stones throw from a nature preserve called Kiket Island, Skagit has just a couple of campsites, one of which is comprised of a grassy lawn perched above a rocky outcrop bordered by a pebble beach on one side and a shallow cove on the other. Although we were still in Skagit County, it felt like we had made it to the San Juans. A lovely little trail rims the island and you can walk the whole thing in about fifteen minutes. And I know this shouldn’t matter as much as it does (and it does), but the outhouse was great! Totally clean and airy, and bigger than our bedrooms at home! We watched the sun set over Deception Pass from the bluff on the west side of the island. That would be our next goal: through Deception Pass and into the San Juan Islands
