“Shit!”
“What?”
“Ugh…”
I rolled over, felt across the tent for Giovannina and realized that she wasn’t there. My eyes didn’t want to work. I coaxed them open and found my headlamp hanging from a pocket in the tent. I turned it on. Her sleeping bag was pulled back and the tent door on her side was open. Giovannina never leaves the tent door open. I looked at my watch. It was just after midnight. Before I could awaken myself further to investigate the situation, she climbed back in the tent.
“They got my PFD,” she said.
“Who?”
“Raccoons.”
Damn raccoons.
Working her way back into the sleeping bag she said, “I left a half-eaten granola bar in my PFD and they must have smelled it. I heard something outside, like they were dragging something. I went to see what it was and these two raccoons had already dragged it up into the woods. I threw some rocks at them and they ran off. Good thing I stopped them. They would’ve destroyed it. I wouldn’t have a PFD.”
“Fuckers,” I muttered, my brain slowly developing a picture of what was going on.
“I think they’re gone now. I made sure there’s no food in my PFD and I’m leaving it under the vestibule. I don’t think they’ll come back for it.”
I turned off my headlamp. I laid there listening to the darkness, straining to hear the little devils.
We’d dealt with raccoons before on kayaking trips and we usually came up on the losing end of the encounter. They are smart, hunt in teams and are a lot stronger and more dextrous than you’d think. We’d been storing most of our food in our kayaks, but had fallen into the habit of leaving a dry bag or two out for the night. This hadn’t been a problem until a small mouse chewed a hole in the side of one on Sucia. After that, we started hanging some of our food when we could, and storing the rest in the kayaks.
The kayak compartments are sealed with rubber compression-style hatch covers and we’d learned on an earlier trip in the Gulf Islands that a raccoon can easily pull one of these off and help himself to the food inside. So to keep out the marauders, we would fasten cam straps around the hatches, cinching them down tight. As an added protection, we had blocks of closed cell foam that we’d place over the hatches before applying the cam straps. Before going to bed, we had hung some of our food – the stuff we were using for dinner and breakfast – and had stored the rest in the kayaks, strapping the hatches shut, but not adding the foam blocks. Our PFDs we left in the cockpits along with our paddles and covered the whole thing with our spray skirts, which kept things dry but wouldn’t keep out a raccoon or other pest. We always made sure to remove any food or lip balm from our PFDs, knowing anything with an scent would definitely attract critters. Giovannina had forgotten about the half eaten granola bar and now the raccoons were interested in our kayaks.
I tried to go back to sleep, but I just kept thinking about the raccoons. Eventually, my curiosity got the better of me, so I turned on my headlamp, put on a pair of shorts, crawled out of the tent and wandered down to the kayaks, which were sitting behind a couple of logs several feet above the high tide line. I shined the light over the boats and saw a number of small, muddy hand prints covering the decks. I always kept my used granola bar wrappers (no bar, just the wrapper) in my PFD. The wrappers work great as fire starters and I figure they would come in handy if I’m ever stranded and need to start a fire (and I’m kind of lazy and just leave the wrapper in my PFD after I’ve eaten the granola bar.) I wanted to know if a wrapper alone would be enough to attract the raccoons, and so pulled one from my PFD, stuck it under a bungee on the deck of my kayak, and crawled back into the tent to listen. Giovannina was laying there, still awake. I explained what I did. She didn’t say anything and just nodded. I couldn’t tell if she agreed with my logic or thought I was a complete idiot (I’ve learned that, in a marriage, such moments happen quite frequently.)
Within minutes we heard them scampering across the kayaks.
Shit.
We both got up. The raccoons had dispersed by the time we got to the kayaks. The granola bar wrapper lay off to the side. I picked it up and stowed it in our hanging food. We checked the straps over the hatches and again made sure they were tight. We shined our lights up towards the trees and saw several bright little eyes staring back at us. Uneasily, we climbed back into our sleeping bags, hoping this had taken care of things. But we both had a creeping suspicion we were in for a long night.
I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I remember is being woken up by the sound of crinkling cellophane.
Fuckers!
We were out of the tent, headlamps aglow, fat, furry mammals scurrying in all directions. Sticking out from underneath the front hatch of Giovannina’s kayak we saw the torn corner of a tortilla chip bag and several chips scattered on the ground. The cam straps were still firmly in place, but the little buggers had pried back the rubber hatch cover, reached in and grabbed ahold of our chip bag. I was pissed. Whatever game we were playing, we were definitely losing.
We got out the foam blocks, loosened the cam straps, slid the blocks under the straps and then cinched them down hard onto the hatch covers. This had to work. No way in hell they were getting through that. We scoured the area to make sure there wasn’t a trace of food or even a scent they might be drawn to. Very anxious, but also very tired, we headed back to the tent. I looked at my watch. It was 1:00 am.
I don’t think I slept at all. I could hear the soft scuttling sounds of a dozen feet padding their way towards the beach. I figured they’d find the hatches inviolably sealed and would go torment some other campers.
But soon we heard a loud snapping noise accompanied by grunts and growls.
Son of a bitch!
The raccoons were chewing the cam straps! If they destroyed the cam straps, all hope was lost.
We clambered our way out of the tent. The beasts scattered again, but not so far this time. They knew there was a lot of food in that kayak and they weren’t giving up. But we were. Like McArthur leaving the Philippines we opted for a strategic retreat. Better to lose the battle than lose the war. We decided to pull all of the food from the kayaks, load it in our blue Ikea bags and hang it all from a tree.
Were we in bear country, our food hang would have been breakfast for a mama and cub. But we only needed the about food five feet off the ground and far enough from a tree trunk that a raccoon couldn’t just climb up and grab it. Thankfully, one of the nearby madrones had the perfect bend in its trunk about ten feet off the ground, plenty tall enough to be out of the reach of a raccoon. Surrounded on all sides by the feisty vermin, we gathered the food-filled Ikea bags, turning in circles to keep the light from our headlamps shining on the marauding horde. I tied a water bottle to the end of a fifty foot length of parachute cord and tossed it over the tree. Gio grabbed the water bottle, removed the cord and tied it to the Ikea bag. I lifted the bags while she hoisted. All the while we could see the raccoons circling us, big fat ones and little fuzzy ones, furtively eying our food supply. Now and then one would inch closer and we’d stomp a foot to back it off.
Finally the bags were hung. The raccoons stared at us, as if anticipating our next move. We tossed a few rocks at them to get them to move off. They just twitched, and stood their ground.
At this point, I was pretty sure the raccoons couldn’t get the food (though I did have visions of one climbing up the tree, perching itself above the Ikea bags and then, like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible, skydiving into the mother load.) But it was now 2:00 am, and we were both exhausted. Maybe it was the fatigue, but we honestly couldn’t think of anything else we could do. So we climbed back into the tents and listened again for the sound of crinkling plastic. We could hear them milling around somewhere in the trees, but the sounds grew fainter and soon it was quiet. I strained my ears and tried to stay vigilant but we were too tired and soon were fast asleep.
We woke around 7:00 am, the sun already above the horizon. I had worried that in our attempt to raccoon-proof our food, we’d left ourselves open to an aerial assault by crows. But thankfully most birds can’t smell and the food was covered up enough that a passing crow couldn’t see inside the bags. Hungry for some comfort food after a long night, I lowered the bags from the tree and searched for the small, gray dry bag with the breakfasts in it. It all appeared to be untouched, a welcome relief. For the rest of our stay on James Island, we would be hanging our food. We were not going to mess with the raccoons again.