Sunday morning it was practically flat calm. A perfect day for exploring coastal Kodiak by kayak and paddle board. So the kids and I called Uncle Dicky and suggested a trip to Puffin Island, he liked the idea, and away we went.
I had not been to Puffin Island since my first kayak trip way back in 1996. But I have always wanted to go back and explore the uplands. When landing in a plane on Kodiak you usually fly right over the island, and I had looked down and noticed all the old WWII bunkers. It looked pretty intact and worthy of exploration.
Puffin Island is about a mile and a half offshore, and when we launched it was pretty foggy and we could not see the island, or even more than a couple of hundred yards - if that. We almost quit on the trip, but decided to go for it and our use our electronic devices for navigation. Also if we did get lost or somehow split up the plan was to go dead downwind and hence back to shore near where we had started.
And so off we went into the fog. It was a long way, but we could look at our iPhones and knew exactly where we were in relation to the island. Later, on the way home when the fog had cleared, I was sort of happy that we had started in the fog. It looked so far that I might not have wanted to paddle over if I could have actually seen the island.
We finally did land on the island at a glorious beach. Nesting puffins flew close over our head to their nesting burrows above the cliffs. The island is covered in sea grass and very lush with tall vegetation. There was no way to see anything and we used aerial imagery on our iPhones to figure out where the bunkers were located.
We found one underground bunker - it looked like it was an ammunition bunker - and it even still had intact wooden doors. This is sort of rare on Kodiak. Most WWII bunkers are pretty heavily visited and covered in graffiti. Exploring the island and looking for other bunkers was a little scary because the vegetation was so thick we could not see our feet. So we walked in a line and the first person went very carefully. Later on we did encounter an open hatch to a fuel bunker and Stuey actually almost fell down into the hole. So it was good that we were careful.
While we were there the fog burned off and before we paddled back we had sandwiches on the beach. A spectacular place for a picnic. And then it was time for the slog across open water back to the 'mainland'.
No comments:
Post a Comment