We drove up to Sidney, had a nice restaurant dinner and caught the evening ferry to San Juan Island. Rob and Nora reserved a room at a bed and breakfast. Maryly and I drove around and found a room at a cheep motel. Don drove around to several campsites and lucked into one that had a canceled reservation. Normally campsites on San Juan Island are filled up months in advance. In the morning Don saw whales from the campground and called us to join him. We all moved to the San Juan County Park and set up camp for two days.
We paddled south to Lime Kiln Point, watching the ocean for Orca whales and the shore for bald eagles. The whales never showed up. The eagles put on a great show, landing on the rocks close to the shore. We planned the trip so that we would paddle into the start of the flood tide and then let it carry us back to camp when we got tired. Around one last point we encountered a strong rip current with dancing water on the surface. It seemed to only take a moment to drift into the worst of this current and then several long minutes of paddling back across it to get into calm kelp-clogged water close to shore. When we hit the rough water Maryly suddenly could not feel the mass of my body in the boat any more. She wondered if I had been tossed out somehow, but turned around to see that I was still there. I am guessing that what she felt was me rolling my hips with the tossing of the water to keep the boat level. Rob and Nora were very uncomfortable with the dancing water and were happy to turn back and head for camp. We went back closer to shore through the kelp and did not use the rip tide to help pull us home.
The next morning we got on the water earlier to take advantage of some better tides. We went north instead of south and kept our eyes out for whales. They didn't show again. We had a calm easy paddle and spent most of our time commenting on the architecture of the houses built along the shore. We ran low on time and had to turn back to break camp and pack up for another ferry trip.
Every day we saw orca whales go by past the campground. A pod would go by in the morning and come back the other way in the afternoon. We never saw a whale while we were in our kayaks. By the time we left San Juan Island we had figured out what to do (but didn't have time to try this). We should have put on our wetsuits and sat down on the cliff at the side of the campground. When the first whale came by we should have run down to our boats and launched. Then we could have been in the water when the rest of the pod came by. This might be considered harassing the whales. It also would have meant sitting around overheating in our wetsuits. Instead we lazed about in camp and saw the whales from dry land. They came by close enough to hear them breathe when they surfaced.