Life On Survey

 

The Big Bay side of Skiff Passage portage

While on Shuyak Molly and I did a lot of kayaking and hiking. Shuyak Island has a very convoluted coastline and we had to survey all of it.  The hardest part was coming up with a plan where we did as little backtracking as possible.  We had to be efficient to cover all the coastline in the time allotted to us.  

Our basic method was to spend 2 days at each camp or cabin. On the first day at each camp Molly and I would split up and hike the coastline in different directions.  This is the way we surveyed the outer coasts that would have been scary to survey by kayak. And at the end of the day we would meet back in camp.  During the day while separated we would keep in communication by radio, and, if we got too far apart for the radio, by Inreach device. 

Then on the second day we would pack up our gear into the kayaks and leave for another camp.  On that day we would survey from our kayaks.  And, again, we would often separate. For instance, to cover both sides of an inlet or go around either side of an island.  We would also leap frog each other as one person checked a likely spot on foot the other would go ahead and get out at another likely spot.

We also had a number of portages across narrow necks of land.  Most of them were quite short, but at one we hit the portage at low tide and had to deflate the kayaks and make a couple of trips to get all the gear over to the other side. 

Patrick

This is not the actual cabin that we stayed at but another that I visited while surveying. Still they all look basically the same inside