Some of my happiest memories have been of close wildlife encounters by kayak: visits to puffin colonies, meetings with various species of whales, face-offs with bears. In a kayak, as opposed to a motorized vehicle, I meet the animals on their terms. What happens next is as much up to them as me.

In search of new wildlife experiences, I paddled out to Grays Canyon, a submarine canyon that indents the continental slope off the coast of Washington. Out on the ocean, out of sight of land, I encountered albatrosses, shearwaters, fulmars, jaegers, and other exotic species that are almost never seen from shore, or even from boats that hug the coast. Few kayakers have ever seen these incredible birds, yet here they were by the thousands.

It took twenty-two hours in the kayak to cover the sixty-five miles (104 km) to Grays Canyon and back. It would have taken twenty-three, but I capsized in following seas in Grays Harbor about two miles short of my launch beach. The ebb current pulled me swiftly onto the Grays Harbor bar, where breakers prevented me from climbing back into the kayak.

A commercial fishing boat named the Western Edge and, later, a coast guard lifeboat responded to my mayday call and extracted me from the water. In heavy chop on the bar, the fishermen were unable to recover my kayak or gear, losing their own gaff during the attempt. Everything was swept out to sea.

The next morning, a different fishing boat discovered my capsized kayak four miles offshore, but they did not have the capability or duty to recover it. The day after that, one of the coast guard lifeboats did manage to recover the kayak at sea.

My two good cameras were in drybags in the cockpit. They both floated off, so I lost most of my photos, including all my seabird photos. I did have a small, waterproof camera in my lifejacket pocket. Its few photos are all I have left to illustrate the trip.

It wasn’t long after launch that I encountered my first seabirds: sooty shearwaters, hundreds of them, later thousands. This small, dark seabird is the one tubenose species that can sometimes be seen from shore. Indeed, I found the first ones landward of the final buoy in the Grays Harbor buoy line.

A few miles farther out to sea, but still landward of the continental slope, I began to see our other abundant shearwater species, the pink-footed. These large, pale-bellied birds were curious about my kayak. They swooped past to study me from distances as close as twenty feet, so close I could hear the wind whooshing over their wings.

The shearwaters were expert flyers, as they have to be, since they only ever come ashore to breed. They would skim just inches above the surface of the water between swells, popping up and over each onrushing hill of water in the instant before the wave could catch them.

Late in the afternoon, still more miles from shore, I began to encounter pomarine jaegers, an arctic-breeding species that migrates offshore of Washington on the way to its wintering waters in the tropics and subtropics. Jaegers rarely hunt. Instead, they steal fish from other species, including shearwaters.

As I paddled toward a group of some thirty pink-footed shearwaters resting on the water, two jaegers rose from amid the flock and circled my boat to see if I might be carrying any fish they could steal. They flew off in disgust when they learned I was empty-handed. I was surprised the pink-footed shearwaters would tolerate the presence of two jaegers in their flock. Somehow, they must have known these particular jaegers were not on the hunt.

Just before evening, four more pomarine jaegers appeared out of nowhere and approached my boat head-on, like ground-attack planes setting up for a gun run. Unlike the shearwaters, who wandered across the ocean aimlessly and would only swing by to observe my boat in passing, the jaegers made a deliberate beeline for me. The shearwaters seemed curious; the jaegers seemed predatory. The jaegers veered off at a distance of about sixty feet and flew on to look for easier victims.

Saturday was the night of the full moon. It had been my deliberate choice to paddle out to Grays Canyon during the full moon, the idea being to have moonlight during the passage to see the swells and waves and react accordingly.

It might have been a clever plan, but in the event, a thick layer of clouds obscured nearly all the moonlight. The horizon was dimly recognizable, but I only had about fifty feet of visibility to the swells. I had to use a headlamp to read my compass card.

The Brunton compass was not well designed for nighttime operation. The glare of the headlamp rendered the compass almost unreadable, yet it was too dark to read the compass without a light. Squinting at the compass card in the glare only ruined my night vision and made me dizzy.

In the end, I navigated by turning off my headlamp and following my GPS with its screen illuminated on the dimmest setting. The downside to this approach was that I had to look down at my lap periodically to check the GPS, which increased my already substantial seasickness.

Seasickness and fatigue were two factors to which I had given some thought before setting out. Each factor tends to exacerbate the other, yet the treatment for each factor—Bonine for the seasickness, caffeine for the sleepiness—exacerbates the other factor even more. I didn’t want to get locked into a medical arms race between seasickness tablets making me sleepy and caffeine making me seasick!

I carried eight tablets of Bonine, four Starbucks canned coffees, and two Red Bulls, but I only ended up taking two of the tablets, two of the coffees, and one of the Red Bulls over the course of the entire trip. That was about the right balance. I was seasick enough that I couldn’t keep down any rice pudding but could keep down turkey jerky and water. I was fatigued enough that I needed a short nap but not so fatigued that I couldn’t keep paddling afterward.

There was beauty and terror on the ocean at night. Many of the seabirds continued foraging long after dark. They were attracted to the light I had mounted on the deck behind me to alert fishing boats to my presence. Black shapes of birds would whip out of the darkness past my head. Sometimes they mistook the splashes of my paddles for the splashes of fish, and they would plunge into the water right next to my boat.

From time to time, I would encounter whole flocks of seabirds roosting on the water. Their contact calls filled the air from every direction, but from the sound alone, I could never tell where the flock was or how to avoid it until I was already in the birds’ midst. At a distance of thirty feet or less, my headlamp illuminated the birds’ eyes, the only part of them I could see.

Caught like deer in the spotlight, the birds would wait until the last possible second to scramble out of the way, and not always in the right direction. One pink-footed shearwater jumped toward my boat instead of away from it and slammed bodily against the hull. I had to stay my paddling while the birds sorted themselves out, to avoid striking any with my paddle.

Seabirds were not the only creatures abroad on the ocean. Humpback whales appeared periodically through the day and night. During the day, I was thrilled to hear their breaths, although more often than not I was unable to catch sight of their flukes due to the rise and fall of the swell. At night, of course, I could only hear them, poofing and puffing from various directions.

One began puffing a little too loudly. From my dozens of encounters with humpback whales over the years, I have a sense for how loud they sound when they are too close for comfort. In the middle of the night, with the moon at its most thickly obscured, a whale began breathing dangerously close to me, first on one side of the kayak, then on the other. I banged my paddle on the hull to alert it to my presence and put on a burst of speed.

Two hundred yards farther on, I dropped back to cruising speed to catch my breath, only for the whale to surface directly in my path, so close I could see the spout. In this darkness, I had at most fifty feet of visibility, so to see the spout meant the whale was closer to me than that. At my cruising speed of four miles per hour, I would collide with it in a matter of seconds!

I shouted one of the words one shouts when one comes abruptly face to face with disaster. I cranked the kayak over as hard as I could, banged the hull even harder, shouted at the top of my lungs, and put on another, longer, faster burst of speed. The whale came up once more closely on my right side, then disappeared and was not heard from again.

The whale must have experienced me the same way I experienced those silly shearwaters, unable to avoid a larger creature except by frantic, last-minute action.

Out near the edge of the continental shelf, I entered a field of bioluminescence. Usually, bioluminescence looks green to me, but out here, the organisms seemed to be glowing bright magenta. They coated the blades of my paddles in glowing spots. When I trailed my hands in the water, my hands came up speckled with glow, as if I were under some kind of enchantment. I could even chart the streaking movements of fish beneath the surface by watching magenta flashes in the water.

I reached Grays Canyon shortly after two o’clock in the morning, having paddled thirty-two miles in nine hours. It would be several hours until dawn, but my departure had been dictated by the timing of the ebb in Grays Harbor. There was nothing for it but to try to catch some sleep. I rigged a paddle float outrigger and dozed fitfully. My waking thoughts invaded my dreams, and I thought about my dreams while awake. I tried again to eat some rice pudding but could not keep it down.

A few hours later, the predawn cold woke me the rest of the way up. The moon had not yet set, but nautical twilight was already glowing to the east. It was time to chum.

Chumming is a time-honored practice of birders. On what they call “pelagic trips,” birders charter motorboats to take them out to the continental slope to see the same bird species I’d been seeing. The birders spread fish oil and fish parts on the water to attract seabirds. Most seabird species, unlike most terrestrial species, have excellent senses of smell, and the ones that don’t follow the ones that do.

Chumming is guaranteed to bring in the birds, but it’s not as easy as it sounds. The internet is full of recipes and advice concerning such important chum considerations as buoyancy, odor, shelf life, attractiveness, availability, and cost.

Do not imagine, warns the internet sternly, that you can simply buy a frozen fish fillet from the grocery store and toss it into the water. You fool, frozen fish sinks! Now you’ve come all this way only to lose your chum in the first three seconds! If you want to freeze your chum, you must freeze it in a block of freshwater ice to keep it afloat.

I sourced my chum from the Ballard fish market, where they sold me a ten-pound bag of fish parts for five dollars. After much thought, I froze it in two separate, five-pound chunks for portability but did not freeze it in freshwater ice. Instead, I packed a large mesh laundry bag.

When the moment arrived, I stuffed the fish into the laundry bag and tied it to my decklines. It sank about two feet beneath the surface to the end of the line. It released enough blood and oil that the seabirds appeared almost instantly and began circling my boat. Some of the fork-tailed storm-petrels flew within inches of my bow in their excitement.

Naturally, I was worried about the man in the gray suit. Great white sharks are rare in Washington, but they are present, and the coast off Grays Harbor is where they are most numerous. On a normal kayaking trip, I wouldn’t spare a thought for sharks, but of all the schemes you could possibly devise to invite a great white shark attack in Washington, probably the most promising would be to float on the edge of the continental shelf, attached to a ten-pound bag of bloody fish parts.

In recognition of my peculiar circumstances, I took the uncustomary precaution of packing a .45 automatic, just to let any miscreant shark know what time it is. When a shark attack actually came, however, it was nothing like what I expected.

I was looking up at the sky, admiring the nearby passage of a Buller’s shearwater, the most handsome of our tubenoses and the only member of this species I saw on this trip, when I heard a gentle splash in the water next to me. At first, I thought maybe one of the tiny storm-petrels had flown too close and hit the water in its eagerness to get at the fish bag, but when I looked beneath the surface, there was a bright blue shark ripping at the bag!

Blue, yes, electric blue. A shark it was for sure, but not a great white. Rather, this was a blue shark, Prionace glauca, so named for its dazzling color.

The blue shark had a spanking white belly, a fact I observed when it rolled onto its back, the better to attack my fish bag. In truth, this was not a very large shark, six feet in length, maybe seven or eight at most. In any case, certainly no longer than fifteen to twenty feet in length, maybe a little more.

Whatever its true size, it was more shark than I was prepared to handle at six o’clock in the morning. I cut the fish bag loose and paddled away as fast I could.

At no time was I tempted to draw my pistol on the shark. I wouldn’t use lethal force on a wild animal except in an absolute extremity, such as if a great white shark were biting my kayak. It is also the case that, in all the excitement, I forgot I had the pistol until after I had already escaped.

The birds were even more active in the morning than they had been the afternoon prior. I picked up some classic species that I had been hoping to see, including the northern fulmar and the lovely, striped Sabine’s gull. I even caught a distant glimpse of two black-footed albatrosses, visiting our waters after breeding in Hawaii.

I was only able to use binoculars on one percent or fewer of the birds, because I needed to keep my hands on the paddle most of the time to control the boat in the ever-surging swell and waves. Undoubtedly, I missed some species due to this limitation. For example, without binoculars, I could not distinguish short-tailed shearwaters from sooty shearwaters, so I cannot list short-tailed even though they were likely present.

There had been a small craft advisory for the offshore waters during most of the period I was at sea. However, the forecast zones for the ocean cover wide areas, and this particular advisory had been generated due to a large, stationary high-pressure system far out to sea. By monitoring the ocean buoy reports and the wind models, I had estimated that winds would be mild out to thirty miles, and this proved to be correct. Winds rarely exceeded five knots, and only hit fifteen knots for a ten-minute period as I was re-entering the Grays Harbor bar.

The Grays Harbor bar is a notorious danger zone, particularly during the ebb. The coast guard publishes a two-page instructional pamphlet on crossing the bar, featuring seven different mapped “danger areas” that encompass basically the entire harbor. The trick with the bar is that the ocean swells are always trying to enter, so whenever there is an ebb tide trying to leave, steep, breaking waves are the result of the conflict between the two waters.

My original plan was to enter the bar at the tail end of the afternoon ebb, when conditions would be settling. However, I made such faster progress than I expected that I was actually in a position to catch the tail end of the preceding afternoon flood, which would give me a helpful push into the harbor and save me several hours of waiting out the next ebb.

The danger to this new plan was that if I were still on the water when the ebb began, the ebb would retard my forward progress (bad news) and subject me to steep breakers from the swell (worse news). So I would have to hurry.

I crossed the bar without any difficulty and hugged the north jetty about a hundred yards out. When the ebb came on, it was much stronger than I had seen in the current tables. Instead of 1.5 knots as expected, it was more like 2.5 knots, almost faster than I could paddle through the swells. It’s possible the current nearest the jetty may have accelerated around the bend at the jetty’s east end, a phenomenon I have observed in other places where a point of land protrudes into a current.

The following seas were building as the ebb increased. Sliding down the backside of each swell, my forward progress would drop to zero. I could only progress on the forward face of each swell. I was, in effect, stationary at the time each swell hit me from behind.

In these conditions, it was only a matter of minutes before a breaker hit me at an awkward angle—I never even saw the one that did it—and flipped me over. It was not a sudden, sharp blow; I had fielded hundreds of those over the course of the last two days. Rather, it was a building, inexorable push. I did not realize until too late that this was one was different from all the others, that a little countervailing lean of the boat was not going to right the situation this time.

At the time, I didn’t know how to roll a kayak, and this was no place to learn. I popped up next to the boat and righted it. The breaking swells filled the cockpit full of water and knocked it back upside down almost instantly. This happened several more times over the next minutes until I gave it up as a bad job and got on the radio for help.

Several boats responded immediately, but there was some confusion as to my location. I described my location as “north jetty, at the east end of the jetty.” That was accurate from my point of view, but there is also a submerged jetty that extends over a mile east of the visible jetty where people can walk. I was aware of the submerged jetty—indeed, I planned to slip through a gap in the breakwater to obtain shelter from the breakers—but it did not occur to me that other boaters listening to my call, including the coast guard, thought I was at the east end of that structure. The confusion delayed my rescue.

A cabin cruiser found me first, but by now, I had been carried most of the way back out to sea, onto the Grays Harbor bar. Conditions here were even worse than off the jetty, and much worse than when I had crossed the bar so easily just half an hour earlier. The cabin cruiser had a swim ladder, but its crew were concerned about broaching in the turbulent bar conditions, so they did not approach too closely.

They did relay my position to the coast guard, which was helpful because my radio stopped transmitting after my first ten or so calls. Its battery was still full, and I could still receive, but I found out later my transmissions first became muffled and then ceased altogether. I believe the microphone may have become waterlogged due to the breakers surging over it, an undesirable vulnerability for a “waterproof” radio. The model was a Standard Horizon HX 300, just in case you were wondering which marine radio should not be your next purchase.

Next on the scene was the Western Edge, a commercial fishing boat. Its crewmen, fresh off a voyage to Homer, Alaska, were less daunted by the heavy chop than the yachties had been. They threw me a lifering and hauled me over the rail, a two-man job because of the water that had leaked into my drysuit.

The fishermen then attempted to recover my kayak and the various pieces of gear that were floating alongside it, but the conditions were too rough, and they eventually lost their own gaff in the waves. The coast guard lifeboat came up and escorted us back to the dock in Westport.

Below is a recording of the radio traffic during the rescue. To create this file, I consolidated the recording of each transmission into a single audio file. Consolidating the recordings eliminated the dead airtime between transmissions, such that the audio now makes it sound like each event occurred immediately following the preceding event. In reality, things did not evolve this quickly. The real-life rescue took about forty minutes between the initial mayday call and my rescue by the Western Edge.

A coast guardsman loaned me a set of dry clothes and gave me some water and an energy bar. I had just had the presence of mind to grab the drybox containing my wallet, keys, and phone before it floated away, so I was able to call a cab to take me all the way around Grays Harbor back to my car.

Back at home, I began a battle with my insurance company over whether a kayak is a “vessel” and whether a capsize is a “covered risk” and whether my insurance company is staffed by “jerks.” After some disagreement between the agent and the adjuster, Allstate covered my lost equipment.

I had tremendous support from everyone in Grays Harbor during the rescue. The fishermen were extraordinarily competent mariners and brave, too, placing themselves at some risk on the bar to try to get back my boat. The coast guardsmen were all extremely professional, helpful, and kind. Even the tourists onshore who called 9-1-1 did exactly the right thing within their capabilities.

It would have been difficult or impossible to recover on my own amid the choppy conditions on the bar, so it is likely that the community’s response saved my life. I am grateful, too, that the coast guard was able to recover my kayak two days later. It is not their duty to recover gear adrift, but exceeding expectations is a way of life for them.

Notwithstanding the disastrous end, it was still a magnificent trip. Since the advent of the internal combustion engine, few people have experienced the wild birds of the ocean in as personal way as this.

Besides just seabirds, I had hoped to encounter something of what Ed Gillet did when he described the ocean as a landscape full of places, each as distinct as “the places that are more obviously marked on land with roads, signs, sentinel trees, or mountains.” I had hoped to find something like the Micronesian navigators’ “seamarks,” places on the ocean that one can recognize by their special characteristics (pwukof) or, more subtly, by their geometrical relationship to other, known landmarks (etak).

I encountered no such things. Even on the canyon, I did not notice anything different about the waves or even the color of the water. When I tried to navigate at night using only the direction of the swells, I became disoriented, confusing the primary swell with the smaller secondary. Perhaps I lack the sensitivity for such delicate natural observations, or perhaps I simply haven’t yet spent enough time at sea.

For now, it is enough to be back on land, safe at home with my beloved wife and children.

—Alex Sidles