The rain had stopped in the night and the air cleared to show us a cabin on the mainland and smoke coming from a nearby beach. We hurried to get our colorful tarps and tents down and worried about being attacked by Indians. Looking at the map later I saw that the Ozette Indian reservation is small and ends north of Ozette Island. The cabin we saw may not have been in Indian territory and the smoke may have been from campers on the Olympic National Seashore trail.
We stopped at Sand Point and looked at the campground we were supposed to stay in. It had a creek next to it and Roger was anxious to replenish his water supply. But the water was brown with tannin from the rain forest and did not look appetizing. We continued on looking for a larger stream. The map indicated that none of the creeks came all the way from nearby Ozette Lake, so all the local water was from short creeks that filtered through tree duff. We worked our way through a field of small offshore rocks to find a beach with calm water to land for lunch. There was no stream of any color in the notch above this beach. While we were eating a hiker came around the point from the north. We asked him about water and he told us about a creek just around the next point south. He showed us a water bottle full of yellow liquid and warned us it was not very appetizing looking. We paddled around the next point and landed to check it out. It was the same brown tannin water we had seen at Sand Point, but now Roger was desperate enough to run some through his water filter.
We were concerned that the water near the beach would be brackish so we tried to find our way into the Forest Primeval to get above the high tide. We followed a trail off the beach that meandered and faded into the brush. The trail went over an obstacle course of fallen trees with ferns growing over them to hide the hazards. I stepped on a snag that tore a hole in the side of my new booties. Roger fell into a hole and cut his ankle right through his wetsuit. While walking across a log over a small gully my feet slipped out from under me and I fell face down onto the log. I caught myself before my face hit the log, but there was another snag lying across the log with a sharp stick pointing straight up. I stopped myself just as the stick poked me in the cheek and drew blood, less than 2 inches from my eye! Roger was watching from the other side of the gully and he saw the snag appear out of the ferns as I was landing on it. He says the trip, perhaps my life or half my eyesight almost ended right there. Afterwards we had an overdue safety talk. I told Roger where my VHF radio was, told him to call the Coast Guard for a helicopter if something like this happens, and told him where I hid the big first aid kit in my boat.
We waded down the little gully to a big pond of dark brown tannin-laden water and made our drinking water. Roger had a pump with a non-field cleanable filter and he says it got harder and harder to pump as he filtered more of this water. I had a new electronic gadget called an MSR MIOX that purifies water by electrolisizing chlorine ions out of salt water. Then we made our escape from the forest primeval and returned to the sea.
With all the stops looking for water we were running a little behind schedule. I had another Ninja camping plan that would allow us to stop a little early again on this day. Instead of continuing to our scheduled camp on “Beach 3”, we stopped 4 miles early and looked into James Island. This island guards the entrance to the town of La Push and is even connected to the mainland by a breakwater. But facing the sea there is a huge notch that practically cuts the island in half. Why camp in a designated place when we can Ninja camp in a fjord on a forbidden island? We paddled into this and agreed that we could just find enough room to set up two tents above high tide on the steep rocky beach. The sky stayed clear and we had a spectacular sunset looking straight out to sea through the mouth of the notch in the island.
In the middle of the night the tide did come up so high that it picked up some logs ad banged them into the log we were camped behind. This woke Roger up and he went to move his kayak higher up the beach. But our predictions on how high the water would come turned out to be correct.