On June 4th and 5th, I took a trip out to the Olympic Peninsula to look for tufted puffins in the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Puffins spend most of the year far out at sea, but they come to the coast to nest in burrows on offshore islands during the spring and summer. In Washington, most puffins nest on the outer coast, but there are two small colonies in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, one of which is on Smith Island, and the other here, on Protection Island.

Because it was still early in June, I thought the puffins might be spending most of their time inside their burrows, incubating eggs and perhaps emerging only briefly once or twice a day to swap out with their partners.

It would be hard to see the puffins under such conditions, so I budgeted two days to visit them at Protection Island. My plan was to sit in the boat in front of the slopes where the burrows are and just wait and wait for a puffin to emerge. If I still hadn’t seen a puffin after the first day of waiting, I’d return to the mainland, camp, and try the same thing again the next day.

Luckily, the puffins turned out to be much easier to spot than I feared. Within about twenty minutes of arriving off Protection Island, I spotted a pair of them on the water, and twenty minutes later, found two more.

I was so happy to see the puffins I ended up spending a couple hours off the island, just watching them and the other seabirds that also nest there. I even saw a couple of whimbrels fly past overhead.

The waters were very calm, especially by the standards of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, which can be a rough place. The easy conditions were a boon to me for birding purposes, but not everyone out there appreciated them the way I did: along came a catamaran crew participating in the first day of the first-ever Race to Alaska, which went on to become a popular annual event. The same calm conditions that were giving me such a pleasant paddle seemed to be slowing down the catamaran crew in their crossing to Victoria. Nevertheless, they looked like they were having a great time.

Still, the race crew weren’t having more fun than I was. Not only did I find my tufted puffins, I also saw lots of other great birds. Protection Island was home to a giant nesting colony of rhinoceros auklets. There were also tons of pigeon guillemots. Occasionally, one would pop up from underwater right next to my boat.

The visit to Protection Island on the first day went so well I knew I could never top it if I went there again the second day. So instead of returning to the island, I drove over to Dungeness Spit and paddled that.

The walk from the mainland to the lighthouse on the end of Dungeness Spit is five miles (8 km) each way. That’s a long hike on soft sand. Much better to paddle it! From my launch point on the mainland, the lighthouse was only about two and a half miles each way. Conditions were just as calm as the first day, and there was an ebb tide pulling me out toward the end of the spit. The whole scene was so restful, I took a nap in my boat and let the current do the work.

I was planning to spend a few hours at the lighthouse while I waited for the tide to turn. That way, I would have the same effort-free experience on the return leg as I’d had on the way out.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the lighthouse, but to my surprise, it was occupied. A family from Tennessee was staying there as temporary lighthouse curators for a week. They had a week-long supply of food, fresh water from a well on-site, and electricity and internet from an underwater cable. Their only job was to guide visitors through the lighthouse-cum-museum and mow the grass if it got too long.

I had no idea this was a thing people could do! Why isn’t everyone doing this? I’m already planning to sign up for a week out there myself with my wife and family.

After visiting with the lighthouse people for a while, I paddled out farther into the strait. Conditions were unnaturally calm, even glassy. Normally, the strait is much rougher than this, so I took advantage to paddle out and look for Cassin’s auklets. Of our regularly occurring alcids, Cassin’s are the hardest to see, because they stay the further out from shore. The Strait of Juan de Fuca is a good place to see them, but I didn’t have any luck this time. I did find a common murre, though, the only one of the trip, and I saw a pelagic cormorant incubating its egg on a buoy.

Even though I was resting in my boat and barely paddling, the flood current still carried me back to the mainland before high tide. There, a mudflat several hundred yards long confronted me. Rather than wait for the tide to rise more, I decided to just carry my boat across it.

This turned out to be a big mistake. The mud was the grippiest, grabbiest, suckiest mud I’ve ever encountered. In some places, I would sink almost to the tops of boots with every step. The mud would grab me so firmly I would have to reach down and pull each leg up one at time, literally pulling myself up by my bootstraps.

Of course, pulling up on one leg would push the other leg further down into the mud, so then I would have to pull even harder to loosen that leg to take another step—but pulling that leg up would get the first leg stuck again!

Like the swamp scene from Papillon, I would scout ahead a few yards at a time before daring to carry my heavy boat across the mud. Some parts of the mudflat were less sinky than others, and I tried to pick the firmer areas to walk on with the boat weighing me down.

When I was no more than about fifty yards from shore, however, I finally got impatient and decided to just march straight across. Very quickly, I was sinking to the tops of my boots, and taking a single step would involve thirty seconds of pulling and rocking and heaving. And then, it finally happened: I took a step too far and got stuck.

Even sitting on my kayak and pulling up on my boots with all my strength, I couldn’t free them from the mud. One of them had in fact sunk under the mud, and they were clearly never going to budge.

“Oh well,” I decided. “I’ll just have to abandon my boots.” I tried pulling my foot out of one boot. It wouldn’t come. I tried pulling my other foot out of the other boot. It wouldn’t come either. I was stuck fast, unable even to remove my feet from the boots.

I finally wrenched one foot loose after a five-minute battle, but the other foot just would not budge no matter how hard I tried. My frantic struggles attracted the notice of an Alaskan fisherman on shore, who came over to see if I was OK. There was nothing he could do for me, of course. I was too far out for tossing a rope, and in any event, pulling me out by rope would have required breaking my ankle.

Unable to help me in my struggle, the fisherman regaled with me stories of his own battles with mudflats in Alaska, including one in which he had to abandon a pair of waders. He was very familiar with boots getting stuck in mud and feet getting stuck in boots, and he encouraged me to keep doing what I was doing: sticking my paddle blade into the mud and rocking it back and forth to break the mud’s seal. This technique finally succeeded, and although I still couldn’t free the boot, I at least got my foot out of it.

Having so narrowly escaped the mud, I was not eager to step in it again. I spent the next three hours sitting in my boat while the tide slowly rose toward me. At last, the rising water floated my boat free of the mud, and once the water got deep enough, I paddled over to shore and hobbled over the pebbles, bootless. Luckily, I had a pair of tennis shoes waiting for me in the car.

I’d dealt with quicksand and large mudflats before, but the mud at Dungeness was something else. I definitely won’t be launching or landing from there at anything other than full high tide. At no time was I ever in danger, and there was a large element of comedy in being unable to extract my foot from a boot while so close to shore that I could talk to people on the beach. A couple of folks were taking pictures with their phones, so I’m probably on Facebook somewhere as “idiot stuck in mud.” The whole thing was funny at the time, and funnier still in retrospect, even though I had to buy a new pair of boots. And it reminded me to reread Papillon.

—Alex Sidles