Trip Stories
These are articles sent to us by our guests.
Five Buddies Paddle
In the third week of August 2004, a plan was hatched by five buddies to paddle kayaks in South Eastern Alaska. We were on a fabulous kayaking trip in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, paddling from the island of Barra in the north to Mingulay and Barra Head in the south. On our return journey to Barra the plan was cooked: our intrepid team of 4 Scots and an American would travel to Alaska to see if we could find the same level of independent travel by kayak. Unlike the USA, Scotland has no trespass laws, fussing park wardens and DNR officials allocating camp sites which must be pre-booked. You may travel freely to any island, land on any beach and camp on any good looking site. That makes it very easy to commit to paddling in areas where the weather might turn against you and require a couple of days of down time. If you’re paddling on the open sea on a DNR time schedule, you run the risk of weighing movement decisions on the need to keep to the schedule rather than the prevailing weather conditions.
Just for the Halibut? Guess Again?
Halibut were our priority, and we could not wait to wet a line for the big flatfish we'd read so much about. We wondered how elusive, or how easy, they would be in the waters of Icy Strait. We caught a couple of small ones our first afternoon, a good sign, but also had orders to catch 25 salmon for the smokehouse. The salmon didn't cooperate on our first try (as we later learned that was our own fault), so we took a detour to see the local sea lions on an outer island. We rode some waves to get there and experienced tide rips for the first time, boiling and churning water as it sloshes from one side of the earth to the other with the pull of the moon.
