- I am not a smarter person.
- Mike packs too heavy.
We left Friday afternoon. On the ferry ride from San Pedro to Two Harbors the water was very choppy. The ferry was smaller than any ferry I had been on before. Probably twenty-five feet across and maybe 100 feet long. The point is, it was pretty small, but fast, which meansthat as the water got choppy, the ferry would ride up the waves and then drop down the other side. It was like a roller coaster! You totally got that DROP feeling in your stomach when the front of the boat came down. People were rushing off to the bathroom with sea sickness. I - because I am awesome - was just having a great old time. Mike, on the other hand, was getting queasy and turning green. He didn’t throw up though, which clearly means he is a rockstar.
If I were a smarter person, two things would have come to mind to me at this point. The first would have been, “Gee, the ocean is kind of rough, I wonder if it will be like this all weekend?” and “Gee, I hope that this doesn’t mean that my first ever kayaking experience will be more potentially deadly than I had anticipated.”
I, however, am not a smarter person.
The ferry arrived in Two Harbors. When you step out onto the dock you are struck by what a tiny and primitive place it is. The water is super clear. Not crystal clear like a brochure of the Caribbean, but still clear enough to see down several feet. It would be generous to call Two Harbors a “harbor” at all. It is really just a large cove. The hills are high on either side but tapper down steeply to the “town” (which is also a generous word). When you’re standing on the dock, there is only a half a mile of land between you and the Pacific Ocean on the other side of the island. A good wave could take the whole place away.
So when you’re standing on the dock taking in Two Harbors in all of its Spartan glory, the beach looks nice and yellow-brown. If you look closely though, you see that the “beach” is mostly small rocks worn smooth by the water. There isn’t much sand. On the hills up to the right there are tired old houses where the locals live (virtually everyone in Two Harbors works in the tourist industry). Up to the left is a campsite. That’s about it.
Straight down the dock and on the left side is the Visitors’ Center. A small building with some windows on the side where we had to check in for our campsite, get the keys to our lockers (At the campsite there are metal lockers. Each one has inside a bundle of firewood and 2.5 gallons of water. I had purchased two.)
On the right side of the dock is the dive shop. It is a little white shack and next to it there are about two dozen kayaks stacked out on the sand. They are yellow and blue and orange and look pretty sitting on the rocky beach under the shade of some palm trees.
As you walk off the dock, straight ahead there is a little “restaurant” with a patio on the front. This is the only “restaurant” in Two Harbors. On the patio there is a little bar. To the right of the “restaurant” is a general store.
We arrived about 2pm and I knew that sunset would be about 7.30pm. I did not know how long it would take to kayak the 4.2 miles to camp, so I wanted to get moving. Instead of being prudent and hitting the water ASAP however, we decided to get some lunch.
Mike ordered a burger and I got fish and chips and both were quite good. As we sat there on the deck we took stock of our bag situation. I had spent the better part of a month packing and repacking my bag and tossing things out and getting it lighter and smaller. My bag has an internal frame and an internal volume of 40 liters (they measure these things in liters, apparently). Fully loaded my pack weighed about 30 pounds. I had been reading a lot of ultra light hiking websites and that compulsive/addictive thing in my brain started pulsating and saying, “Lighter. Pack lighter. Pack lighter.” Please understand that I didn’t pack light because it was smart to do so (I’m not trying to convince you that I make smart decisions or anything), I did it because it became a minor obsession in the weeks leading up to the trip. 30 pounds in not actually considered ultra light, but for my first ever outing, not too shabby.
Mike was in a very different situation. He went for an external frame backpack that was much larger than mine. It has an internal volume of about 50 or 60 liters and it was STUFFED FULL. Loaded up it probably weighed about 55 pounds. It would take Mike about thirty seconds to lift it, get his arms in it, adjust it and be ready to walk with it. Now I will say that he had a lot of equipment that I didn’t because he was essentially documenting the whole trip. He brought his good camera for video and pictures as well as a tiny camera (the sort that you clip to your body when you go skydiving), and remember that traveling with that kind of gear means that you’re also traveling with lenses and batteries and extra batteries and waterproof cases and Mike even had a battery pack for charging the extra batteries.
So that was our bag situation. We finished eating and reflecting and that ended up taking about an hour.
Around 3pm we walked over to the little dive shop to rent our kayaks and then they told us that there was a small craft advisory and they couldn’t rent us kayaks.
NO KAYAKS!
I tried explaining to the dive shop lady that I HAD A PLAN! I even offered to show her a copy of The Plan, but alas, it did was to no avail.
(The Plan)
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