A circumnavigation of Marrowstone Island is one of the classic saltwater paddles of Washington. The local kayak clubs all make circumnavigations on a regular basis. Although I had camped on different parts of Marrowstone on previous trips, I had never gone all the way around the island until now.

No matter which way I turned, the wind seemed always to be blowing in my face. When I was heading southeast from the launch point toward the southern tip of Marrowstone Island, the wind was in my face. When I reached Kinney Point and turned northeast, the wind somehow continued to blow in my face, notwithstanding the 90-degree turn I had just completed. When I headed north up along the eastern side of the island, the wind, unbelievably, continued to blow directly in my face. When I finally turned northwest at Marrowstone Point at the northern end of the island, the wind once again continued to blow in my face, even though I had now turned 180 degrees from my original heading.

The nearest weather stations, at Smith Island and Port Townsend, reported wind from the southwest—just about the only point of the compass from which I did not face any wind. Topographic features must somehow have caused the local wind to revolve clockwise around Marrowstone Island, which would generate a continuous headwind during a counterclockwise navigation.

Wind was not the only dynamical force refusing to behave as expected. Tidal currents also proved troublesome. My plan was to catch the tail end of the morning ebb, which generally sets northward up Admiralty Inlet along the eastern side of Marrowstone Island, but that proved more complicated than expected.

Out in the main channel of Admiralty Inlet, I could see large, intimidating tideraces. It seemed best to avoid such chop. Hoping for an easier ride, I hugged the shoreline of the island, where the water was calmer.

The inshore water was calmer, but it was also flowing in the opposite direction from the main current. Instead of a helpful boost northward, a nearshore eddy began unhelpfully pushing me southward, reducing my speed to less than two knots. At this rate, it would take three hours to round the top of the island, by which time the favorable ebb would have ended and an unfavorable flood would have developed.

Perhaps the tideraces in the main channel didn’t look so bad after all, I thought. At least the tideraces were moving in the correct direction, unlike the inshore eddy. I headed a few hundred meters offshore into the channel and entered a morass of swirling, bumpy whitecaps.

Waves buffeted me from all directions. Whirlpools yanked my bow this direction and that. Spray from the whitecaps soaked my face, courtesy of that mysteriously ever-present headwind. It was all worth it, though, because my speed over ground leaped from a pathetic two knots to a heroic six and a half knots. A pod of harbor porpoises surfaced just an arm’s length from my cockpit, as if celebrating our ride together.

In no time, I drew level with the lighthouse at Marrowstone Point. Here, I deliberately exited the rocketing tideraces and re-entered the inshore eddy, lest I be carried past the tip of Marrowstone Island and off beyond the horizon of Admiralty Inlet.

Bird life on the water was unspectacular, as is generally the case on Washington’s inland waters during July. There were large numbers of pigeon guillemots and rhinoceros auklets but only a handful of marbled murrelets and not a single common murre. There were also no sea ducks, loons, or grebes, and almost no cormorants.

The situation ashore was more encouraging. There were large numbers of finches in the grassy areas, including American goldfinches, house finches, and red crossbills. The forests were full of nuthatches and chestnut-backed chickadees. I heard both western and olive-sided flycatchers, although I only ever saw any westerns. Of most interest to a birder in western Washington, there were a pair of house wrens in the kayakers’ campsite. This species is common in eastern Washington, but uncommon in most areas west of the Cascade Mountains. The only other place I have seen house wrens in western Washington is in the San Juan Islands, where they are locally common.

Fort Flagler at the northern end of Marrowstone Island is a kayaker’s paradise. Kayakers at Fort Flagler enjoy the best campsite in the park, a secluded area right off the beach. While the car-campers were piled on top of one another in a shadeless parking lot, I was so far from the main campground that I could only hear the other campers when they honked the horns of their cars.

In the morning, I took a tour of Fort Flagler’s Endicott Period coastal artillery batteries. Fort Flagler was one vertex of the Triangle of Fire, a trio of forts sited on both sides of Admiralty Inlet during the late nineteenth century to protect the naval bases in Puget Sound. During its heyday between the Spanish-American War and World War I, Fort Flagler’s armament consisted of a main gun line with two ten-inch batteries and one twelve-inch battery, a double-sized battery of twelve-inch mortars, two secondary batteries of six-inch guns plus another of five-inch guns, and two batteries of rapid-fire three-inch guns to hit fast-moving minesweepers and torpedo boats. The entire twenty-six-piece arsenal was supported by a network of position-finding stations, fire-control rooms, shell-spotters’ posts, and searchlights, to say nothing of the armored, underground powder and shell magazines and hoists underlying the batteries themselves.

The big guns were dismantled between the world wars, when advances in naval gunnery and air-delivered weaponry rendered the Endicott Period forts obsolete. Today, all that remains of the once-formidable installation is a maze of concrete corridors, parapets, and magazines, moldering decade by decade into the earth like the temples of some lost civilization.