Kayaking Fidalgo Bay

We are right in the middle of lots of water, so we certainly wanted to put our kayak to good use during our stay. We checked out several of the mountain lakes around us, but finally decided we should go for water on a bigger scale. Below is a picture of our location and all the water around us. There's some glare on the map, but it will give you a bird's eye view of our location. We are in the town of Anacortes, on Fidalgo Island, which is found on the bottom right hand corner of the map below. The map shows most of the bigger islands around us in the Rosario Strait in the Salish Sea in the state of Washington. For a layman's description, we're in the northwest fuzzy part of Washington where it's hard to determine where the U.S. ends and Canada begins because of all the water.

All these places sounded foreign to us not long ago. As a matter of fact, we're not far from foreign territory since the dotted lines in the left hand bottom corner is the Canadian border. But that's the beauty of living in a motor home and being able to explore new territories for weeks at a time. We get to learn about new places that we didn't even know existed. To further explore this new territory, we inflated our trusty kayak and set out on the waters of the Salish Sea that surround us here on Fidalgo Island.

We put the kayak in at the Cap Sante Boat Marina that is just a couple miles from where we are camped. The water was calm as we made our way across the channel entrance where the big boats cross from the marina to enter the sea.

We like to see the blue outlines of the mountains on the other side of the water. We can even see a tall, snow-covered peak that is partially hidden in the clouds. It's a great day for a boat ride!

We feel a little dwarfed by this huge ship that is being loaded on the industrial port across the water. Actually, we seem tiny next to the two smaller tug boats that were pushing it sideways into place at the harbor.

We got some great advice from a professional kayaker that was escorting a group of people finishing up a four-day kayak trip around the San Juan Islands. He took the time to sit down with us and show us a map of the waterway. His best advice was to hug the rocky shore of Fidalgo Island and watch out for the big boats. So that's exactly what we did. Since it was low tide, we also saw anemones and sea stars hanging on to those rocks just below the water.

We made the circle to get the feel of the sea. Denisa was glad to have this brave rudder man when the passing boats made big waves for little kayaks.

After our loop into the open water, we decided to check out the boats moored in the harbor. There are boats of all sizes lined up all the way to the channel.

We pulled our inflatable kayak in between two yachts. We felt a tiny bit small in both size and price tag.

These boats are kept shiny and clean even in this salt water environment. Our images were reflected in the shiny paint of the dark yacht. This is probably as close as we will ever get to yachting.

As pretty as these big boats are, we prefer our little kayak for our water travel. Then we like our "land yacht" for moving around this beautiful country's highways, as we learn about new places that we didn't even know existed before we retired.