In kayak, you really are one with the water

LARRABEE STATE PARK, Whatcom County — Bernie Swanson dragged my kayak off the sandy bottom into deeper water, and all of a sudden I had that familiar floating feeling, plus a wobbly one, like someone just removed the training wheels.

Seconds later, the bow was splashing through wavelets pushed up from the south. It was part of a wet and windy piece of weather that, at 7 on a Saturday morning, had me thinking twice about going. Now I thought of the kayaker on the Discovery Channel's "I Shouldn't Be Alive," capsized and swimming for shore lest he be swept out to ocean.

No need, really. I was swathed in neoprene, coated nylon, Gore-Tex and rubber gaskets. Fifteen other kayakers were in my group, convened through the Internet to explore Chuckanut Bay and see sea life exposed by a minus tide.

Things felt odd and foreign, but this is what I asked for: As part of writing a boating column and turning more of my life over to being on the water, I had quietly committed to getting out on as many different types of boats as possible.

Mark Greengo had seen my first column and, being something of a volunteer proselyte for his craft, invited me on the outing. So there I was, out in the nation's second-largest estuary, in a craft that is the statistical outlier of the boating spectrum, but with tens of thousands of local fans.

All boats are compromises. Counter the sideways push of wind on a sail, and you get a long keel that has you paranoid near shorelines. Make a boat big and comfortable enough to hold a galley, a salon, sleeping quarters and a head or two, and you'll forget you are on the water. You'll also be spending a lot of money.

A kayak is intimate with the water. Your seat is below the waterline. Your hands get wet. Your lap would get wet if it weren't for a spray skirt. In Puget Sound, where the water temperature rarely gets above 55 degrees, a prudent kayaker needs to dress like a scuba diver, expecting to get wet, even if some go years without ever getting dunked.

In off circumstances, this intimacy leads to moments like the crossing Swanson and Greengo had recently from Kingston to Edmonds. The wind had kicked up from the north and rubbed the outgoing tide the wrong way, creating 6- to 8-foot seas. They did all right, and the ferry boats kept an eye on them, but it was a Maytag.

The kayak is the speck on the ocean. It is so small you basically wear it, but its waterline and narrow beam make it the fastest way to propel yourself on the water and watch where you're going.

The view has a lot going for it.

Greengo takes his boat everywhere, to the sloughs around Everett, the log boom on Opening Day, and a recent display of floating Dale Chihuly glass balls off Medina.

And only a ferry ride or long paddle away lie the 400 or so San Juan Islands, which Swanson calls "the Super Bowl of kayaking."

Moments after launching, our group was weaving among the rocks and taking in the low-tide display, a marvel rarely seen by the Puget Sound region's 4 million residents.

Clusters of purple sea stars glistened in the crevasses, joined by the occasional leather star and even rarer sunflower star, a massive, multi-armed blob measuring up to 3 feet across. Sprinkled among them were anemones, pendulous, milky and translucent.

The ocean was only parting its curtain ever so slightly, but we could already see why some oceanographers question looking for life on Mars when there are so many bizarre and undiscovered life forms here in the deep.

Swanson paddled by and advised me to keep my upper body perpendicular to the horizon, a big help when the boat wanted to flip out from under me like a bar stool.

We crossed Chuckanut Bay, the wind at our backs. In a cove at the north end, the shoreline was a wall of curving, sculpted sandstone like something Eliot Porter might have photographed in Glen Canyon. Coming out of the bank were palm trees, entombed and fossilized and millions of years old.

There was more: harbor seals and their pups, a cloud of harlequin ducks, a pair of syringe-beaked oystercatchers where we lunched on Chuckanut Island, a deer on the rocky shoreline. By the time we closed in on the launch, the wind had all but quit, the sailor's curse and the kayaker's blessing. Swanson's GPS has us steaming at more than 3 knots.

Our boats had done the best a boat can do, taking us to places we hardly ever go. It's wet, but it's a good place to be.

The Boating column appears twice monthly through September in Northwest Weekend. Freelance writer Eric Sorensen, a former Seattle Times staff reporter, keeps two boats in his Kenmore garage and helps sail and maintain Mistral, a 31-foot Seaborn-Blanchard sloop, at Seattle's Center for Wooden Boats. Contact him at svwhim@yahoo.com.