Last time my daughter Maya and I camped on Strawberry Island, in 2021, my son Leon had been too young to join us. Strawberry Island is fringed by rocky cliffs, and I worried toddler Leon would wander too close to the edge. Now, at age five, Leon was finally ready for Strawberry Island.

We were a little late getting on the water, owing to a stop at our favorite donut shop in Anacortes. By the time we launched, the flood was already running quite strongly.

The flood runs north up Rosario Strait, which is helpful for reaching Strawberry Island, but it also runs east up Guemes Channel, which is not helpful. If a kayaker launches too late into the flood, the east-setting aspect of the current can push the kayaker so far to the right that it becomes impossible to enter Rosario Strait.

In our case, we were pushed east of Rosario Strait but not so catastrophically far east that we would have had to go up Bellingham Channel instead of Rosario. We hit Cypress Island about a thousand yards east of Reef Point, the southwesternmost corner of the island. From there, we were able to crawl west along the shore of the island until we rounded Reef Point and gained Rosario Strait. From there, the flood was helpful the rest of the way to Strawberry Island. This route was less efficient than keeping to the west of Cypress the whole way would have been, and it also forced us through a tide race at Reef Point, but such is the price one pays for donuts.

Strawberry Island was looking a little shaggy compared to past visits. The trail between the beach and the campsite in the grassy field was overgrown with Nootka roses. The rose thicket wasn’t much of an obstruction to grown-ups, but it was taller than head-height to Leon. With inconvenience, he could push through the thicket on his own, but he preferred me to go in front to serve as a human bulldozer.

The roses had also taken over the only route children could have used to climb the “mountain” of Strawberry Island, the rocky protuberance south of the landing beach. The roses here were so thick not even bulldozer dad could clear a path.

Even the grassy field overlooking the water, where we always camp, was overgrown. In past years, my wife Rachel and I had harvested wild onions growing here, but this time, the site was overgrown with tall, non-native grasses, crowding out the onions.

Our most exciting discovery occurred on the beach shortly after we landed. Leon had just sat down on a driftwood log to change out of his rubber kayaking boots when he called, “Dada, I can’t change my boots here. There’s eggs.”

Maya and I came over to look, and sure enough, there was a small hollow scraped out of the gravel beach, piled with crushed shells. In the bottom of this shallow bowl lay three eggs, gray with black-and-gray speckles to resemble pebbles. They were the eggs of a black oystercatcher.

The oystercatcher parents watched us balefully throughout the weekend. Whenever we approached, they would rise from the nest, waddle a short distance down the beach, and lie down on a random spot to simulate incubating a nest in a different location than the real one. This was a ruse on the oystercatchers’ part to prevent watching gulls from deducing the location of their eggs. If the oystercatchers lay down at random everywhere they went, then the gulls could never figure out which spot was the real nest.

We did not want to disturb the oystercatchers into leaving their eggs for too long, so we stayed away from their corner of the beach as much as possible. The kids spent much of their time playing in the tent. We left the tent flap open to admit the cool breeze, but unfortunately it also admitted a bee, which perched on Leon’s pillow. He did not notice the bee until he picked up the pillow, whereupon the bee stung him on the palm of his hand. Luckily, it was a mild sting. With generous applications of hydrocortisone cream, the swelling and pain disappeared in under an hour.

Other than the delightful and diligent oystercatcher parents, the best wildlife of the trip was a pair of small humpback whales, one offshore of Strawberry Island, the other in the middle of the channel between Cypress and Washington Park. In both cases, the whales gave only a few short spouts before raising their flukes and disappearing on a long, deep dive—hunters on the move.

On our last morning on Strawberry Island, I lugged the 110-pound (50 kg) Long Haul folding kayak down the beach and dropped it heavily at the water’s edge. Unfortunately, my paddle was already lying there, unnoticed. There was a sharp crack, and when I lifted the kayak, I saw a hairline fracture through the left blade of the paddle.

I was annoyed but not alarmed. A few months earlier, I had slammed the trunk of the car on this same paddle, producing a similar-looking crease. Other than the cosmetic blemish, there had been no harm done in the trunk-slamming incident. I expected a similarly benign result this time.

The result was not benign this time. We had not ventured more than a few hundred yards into Rosario Strait when the left blade of the paddle snapped off in the water. Needless to say, I was not carrying a spare paddle on such a short and easy trip as this.

“But how will we get home?” asked Leon in a tremulous voice.

“Boy, is that a good question,” I thought, but what I said to the kids was, “Dada is very strong. I will just paddle us home using the other half of the kayak paddle, the half which is not broken.”

Strong though Dada may have been, even he struggled to propel the boat using half a paddle. The Long Haul “Quattro” is not a high-performance hull even under the best of circumstances, and now, powered by the world’s least-efficient canoe paddle, our headway was reduced to something reprehensible.

I had timed our departure from Strawberry Island to take advantage of a change in the tide at a particular point along our route, but my timetable had been predicated on the use of a functional kayak paddle, not this woeful stick. It was soon apparent that we would miss the all-important turn of the tide.

By the time we limped past Reef Point and hove into sight of Washington Park, the favorable ebb had already ended and the unfavorable flood had begun. Our already glacial advance slowed still further. The east-setting aspect of the flood began pushing us up Guemes Channel, even as the north-setting aspect retarded what little remained of our forward progress. At this rate, we were on track to land on Guemes Island, not Washington Park.

A passing motorboat observed our unseamanlike maneuvers and hurried over to investigate. Eric and Emily Schuh carried a kayak of their own aboard their yacht, Best Years. After some discussion of our options, they tossed me their kayak paddle to give us a fighting chance against the flood.

Even with a proper paddle in hand, it was still a long slog against the strengthening current. We finally hauled out in Washington Park just under three hours after our departure from Strawberry Island—this on a crossing that normally takes about an hour and a half in a folding kayak or an hour in a hardshell.

On our way out of town, we stopped by the marina where the Best Years was moored to return Eric and Emily’s loaner paddle and thank them for their assistance. Then we made one final stop at the donut shop. We don’t normally stop there on the homeward-bound leg, but this time we had indisputably earned it.

—Alex Sidles