“Posey” is a little French bulldog who lives a block or two down the street. He is one of the kids’ favorite neighborhood pets. Every time we pass his yard, Maya and Leon crane their necks for a glimpse of the beloved Posey.

The kids were delighted to learn the name of our first kayak-camping destination of the year: Posey Island! Even better news was that the whole family could come on this trip: Rachel and I, Maya and Leon.

Similar to Posey the dog, Posey the island is a cute little package that doesn’t demand much travel. From our launch at Roche Harbor on San Juan Island, it took us only half an hour to reach Posey Island.

Posey Island is so small it is the only kayak-campsite in the San Juan Islands that allows reservations during the peak season. At the time of our visit in mid-April, reservations were not yet open, so we had to take our chances that we might arrive to find the island already occupied.

Luck was with us. The only other occupants of Posey Island were birds and animals. Indeed, there were more animal occupants than I expected. In the evening, as we were cleaning up camp, I told Rachel we didn’t need to protect our food against raccoons. I believed, based on previous visits, that Posey Island was too small and dry to support raccoons. I was wrong. Rachel spotted raccoons on the island in the middle of the night. Fortunately, the measures we had taken to protect our food and dishes against mice proved effective against the larger, more cunning raccoons.

Posey Island is a real kayaker’s island. It has one of the gentlest landing beaches in the San Juans and a wide, grassy lawn for camping. The most interesting feature of the island is its tree composition. Around ninety percent of the trees on Posey Island are seaside juniper, the oldest of which are the largest specimens I’ve seen anywhere. There is also a lone Garry oak on the eastern end of the island and a handful of Pacific madrones and Douglas-firs in the interior.

We passed our days sitting on the grassy lawn, going for walks around the perimeter of the island, roughhousing in the tent, and making up games with the kids’ stuffed animals and toys. Leon, age four, was now old enough to keep up with Maya, age seven, even when she sometimes would have preferred to get away from him.

For such a small island, Posey Island was home to a respectable variety of birds and animals: short-billed gulls, black oystercatchers, harlequin ducks and mergansers, bald eagles, white-crowned sparrows, house finches, yellow-rumped warblers, and ravens and crows. Harbor seals hauled out on rocks offshore of the main island, and a river otter swam past the island in the morning.

Rachel made the most impressive spot of the trip, but it wasn’t a bird or animal. Just after we rounded the eastern tip of Pearl Island, she noticed a peculiar, colorful gleam in the water beneath her kayak. We went back for a second look and were amazed to see iridescent flashes of light, seemingly emitted from the fronds of a particular patch of seaweed. To me, the flashes looked blue or violet, but Rachel saw the entire spectrum of the rainbow shimmering from the fronds. Photographs and video proved her right.

Never having seen such a thing, we looked it up on Rachel’s phone. According to the website Seaweeds of the Pacific Northwest, we were looking at a species of red macroalgae, wonderfully named—I am not making this up—the “splendid iridescent seaweed,” Mazzaella splendens. Sure enough, under the right conditions, the splendid iridescent seaweed does, indeed, differentially refract sunlight, just like a droplet of rain in the sky. All these years kayaking, and I never knew seaweed could create underwater rainbows.

I didn’t bring a book. I knew there would be no time for reading, not with my whole family here. Indeed, between the exploring, the stories, the games, and the camp chores, there was barely time for the grown-ups to sit down. Kayak-camping always involves a sort of constant, low-level busyness, and this is nowhere more true than with children. But it’s no burden to look after children in a place like this. I could practically watch them grow as they stumbled over various obstacles on the island, physical and emotional.

One of the most memorable parts of the trip occurred after the kayaking was over. Having returned to Roche Harbor with plenty of time before our ferry, we took a walk in the forest above the harbor. Rachel stopped us in our tracks when she spotted a rare, native orchid growing by the side of the trail. We all leaned in to take photos, which is when we noticed another orchid, and another, and another. We had stumbled into an orchid patch!

Orchids are rare enough that even Rachel, our family’s flower expert, was not sure of the species names. We looked them up afterward and determined that the patch consisted of fairy slipper and striped coralroot. These are two of our more common orchid species, but orchids in general are uncommon, so it was a treat to find so many in one place.

Farther up the hill, we arrived at what looked like a ruined temple looming out of the forest. A low flight of steps ascended to a ring of fluted columns, one deliberately broken, surmounted by an oriental arcade. In the center of the ring, a stone table, surrounded by throne-like seats, lay empty, as if awaiting the return of some long-deceased warlord and his entourage. The incongruous architecture and theatrical desolation gave the scene a dreamy quality. I was reminded of a game from my childhood, Myst, which featured similarly uncanny ruins set amid forested islands. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the authors of Myst were living in Washington at the time of the game’s creation.