Samish Bay Kayaking

   Hello! Happy winter kayaking! With the summer river list intact, I decided to try and knock one off before summer. It was a crisp and forecasted sunny day in the Northwest. It also happened to be post-fowl hunting season around these parts. I did some research on the internet on the Skagit River mouth...apparently there are several hundred thousand (yes that is correct, several hundred thousand) ducks, snow geese, and other birds wintering in the Skagit River mouth. Operation snow geese was about to commence.

...about to commence...until we stepped out of the car and the wind was coming off of the Sound at about 40 knots. Not to mention that the river where we were gonna put in was heading against the wind (a.k.a. waves). So, we wimped out and drove a little bit farther North to Samish Island (see our other post on the 'island' here). I knew that Samish Bay would be protected from the wind and we could thus paddle on the leeward side of the island (P.S. It must be a Northwest thing - we have a lot of islands that aren't really islands...not sure why this is, I'll report back when I find out).

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   If you head over to Samish there is just one place with official beach access, look for the beach access sign (pictured at the end of this post).  There are a few portable toilets there, places to park for free, and a little trail down to the beach. Operation snow geese yielded only a field of geese (pic earlier). We've got until April when most of the birds leave...at least we got some beautiful kayaking in!
   ~Paul & John   ETC

Update: Just added some video from the paddle...