Sunday morning I watched the sky lighten from my tent and the sun rise. We got up early to break camp, and in the sand we saw the tracks of deer that had come down to the water during the night. Fortunately, though, no bear tracks. Our morning plan was to paddle to Sand, see the sea caves, and then land on Justice Bay and have breakfast. We headed off, once again into a wind, once again getting bounced around a bit by the waves until we got into Sand's wind shadow. A geologist is probably going to cringe at what I'm about to write, but here goes. The Apostles are made up of and shaped by 3 different forces. Sand and gravel laid down by ancient rivers a billion years ago has turned into sandstone. The glaciers that last receded 10,000 years ago carved the northern part of the continent over millennia and left behind the glacial till that makes up most of the surface of the islands, including the hills and bluffs. And the waves and ice and wind and rain and plants continually carve and erode and collapse and construct what remains.A billion years ago, when the sandstone was laid down, life on earth did not include land plants.There are a few places in the Apostles where the sandstone emerges and can be found on the surface. Where the sandstone lies at the edge of an island (most spectacularly on Sand, Devils, and a stretch of mainland), sea caves have formed as the waves and ice cut into that ancient rock, and many of the caves are large enough to paddle through. Having read about these caves before the trip, I was really looking forward to seeing them. I wanted to paddle through them and listen to the sound of the waves gurgling and slapping and echoing against the walls and rocks. To look out into the bright sunlight, surrounded by rock that had once been sand deposited on a river bottom a billion years ago. To look up at ripple marks on the ceilings that captured a moment of time on a long gone river. To wonder at the patterns of light and dark rock laid down by those rivers.A bit of luck is required to get a close look at the caves, as you don't want to be in them with an onshore wind, but we were in the lee of the island, and I was delighted that we had the chance to see them.
After paddling through the caves, we headed around the corner to Justice Bay, landed, and had breakfast. The coffee was welcome, to say nothing of the world's most stick-to-your-ribs helping of oatmeal. We hiked to the Sand Island light house, walking through woods of silver birch, cyprus, and other trees. Along the way, we saw a couple of bald eagles soaring off the northern point of the island.After returning to our kayaks, we launched to cross to Little Sand Bay back on the mainland. This time the wind was blowing across our beam, creating a different rhythm to paddle in than the headwinds we had previously faced. It picked up as we left Sand's wind shadow, and once again we got tossed around a bit more than one is used to paddling on Lake Calhoun, but the previous 3 days had sharpened our skills, and we were comfortable and confident in the waves.We landed on the mainland, cleaned out our kayaks, and carried the boats and our gear up to the parking lot. Our guide had a conversation with a couple of folks who wanted to take their recreational sit on top kayaks out to "Sandy Island". She convinced them that this would be a really bad idea in the rough water, and persuaded them to head to the eastern side of the Bayfield peninsula, which was sheltered from the day's winds.The Living Adventure trailer pulled up, and we and our boats and gear returned to our starting point. We unpacked, showered at the Rec Center in Bayfield, and re-grouped at Maggie's Restaurant for lunch. And then it was time to split up and head home. Driving back to Minneapolis, missing the group I had bonded with for the last 4 days, I found the details and demands of my "normal" life slowly popping up and re-asserting their claims on my attention. Where a few days ago I could lose myself in the wonder of a bay on Rocky Island, I now found myself juggling what I had to deal with the next day and what could be postponed. Where I had been able to simply watch an eagle fly, or listen to a loon, or watch the waves as my kayak climbed over and through them, or revel in the joy of having been able to paddle for 4 days with ease, now I was remembering details I had left behind and putting them back into place.But the Apostles will be there when I return. In the meantime, I've added the beaches on Rocky and York, the dock on Oak, and the sea caves on Sand to the places I take out and hold in my memory. I wonder if anyone is doing a night paddle in the Apostles tonight, and what direction the wind is coming from. I remember the lighthouses flashing in the dark, and I imagine the sun coming up on another group's kayaks. I wonder what the sea caves look like in winter, and what the bears and the eagles and the loons do when the people are gone. There are special places all over the world, but this one has touched my heart, and I will return.
Overnight, the hissing and sighing of the waves on the sandy beach was replaced by the rush of wind blowing through the trees. In the morning, there was a high wind and weather passing by to the north and south. Although a more experienced group could have handled the wind, our decision was made for us – we weren't going anywhere until the wind eased up.We went for walks and took pictures, We played cards … killer and spoons. Hovas let me try her boat, a Greenland kayak. We watched one of the sail boaters launch a small skiff with an outboard motor. We couldn't figure out why he kept zooming up and down the shore, but then we saw his dog running up and down the beach with him. Guess that's one way to exercise your dog. We were visited by a lone Canada goose who seemed to want to befriend us. We listened to the weather forecast on the radio (several times) and watched a storm pass over Bayfield to the south. I enjoyed just being there, on that island, with our group, on that day.In the late afternoon the wind eased off. We quickly made and ate dinner, packed up, and started off to Sand about 6:30 PM. We stopped at Bear Island for a short break, then paddled on. We were traveling west into the setting sun, with the full moon rising behind us and Jupiter high in the eastern sky behind our left shoulders. First a yacht, then the schooner Zeto sailed across our path in front of the sun as it sank towards the horizon. To the south we could see heat lightning over the mainland. Shortly after the sun set, we passed Raspberry Island, and looked back at the lighthouse on its western shore flashing in the night. Approaching York, we all put on our headlamps. It was wonderful to be in a group of 5 kayaks moving together in the dark, with the paddles steadily rising and falling, pushing on ever closer to York. Eventually the Sand Island light house came into view behind the far side of York. I thought I heard the call of a loon from across the water, though it could have been a gull.There was some speculation that someone was pulling the island away from us as we approached it, but eventually we reached York. We were running out of gas and decided not to press on to Sand. We headed into the half moon bay, and a couple of kayakers who were camped on the beach apparently saw our headlamps bobbing in the waves and wondered what the heck we were. They were kind enough to shine a light at us, which helped guide us in.It felt good to step out of our boats after the long paddle. Our campsite reservation was on Sand, so on York we ended up camping right on the beach. We built a small charcoal fire and made smores. Looking out from the bay, we could see the Devils Island light house flashing every 10 seconds about 8 miles to the northeast. I hadn't expected to see any lighthouses at night, based on our original itinerary, so seeing three in one night was quite a treat.
After our breakfast of eggs and fruit (and more pesto tortillas), we headed up the western shore of Oak, rounded the northwest corner, and landed on a beach for a short break before heading off to Otter. We saw a juvenile bald eagle (all gray) and then a mature one with its distinctive white head perched in a tree, and then as I walked up the beach, another eagle launched out of a tree right above my head and flew powerfully off.The crossing to Otter was a fun and playful paddle in the light air. Near shore we could look 20 to 30 feet down, sometimes at underwater boulder fields, other times at sand with ripple patterns from the waves. Our guide instigated a squirt gun fight with our bilge pumps. On Otter, we pulled into the beach, swam (briefly – the water was chilly, though not as cold as it was between the islands), and had lunch, then continued on to Rocky, where we landed on another beach. Dinner was burritos (with pesto tortillas, of course). (We had barely made a dent yet in our tortilla supply at this point, and were trying to give them away to other campers. They were perfectly fine tortillas -- it's just that there were about 60 of them, and 7 of us, and we found a half tortilla per meal to be ample. At that rate, we had a lot of tortillas to go.)There was no bear box to store our food on Rocky, so we had to hang our food and other smelly items like toothpaste in a tree. "Where food lockers are not provided, hang the food cache in a tree away from the tent and at least 12 feet from the ground and five feet from the trunk." Doesn't sound hard, does it? Well, it didn't help that we had way too much food (Living Adventure made sure we and several of our closest friends weren't going to go hungry). We looped together all the dry bags containing food and toiletries, and with half of us pushing up the unwieldy bundle and half of us pulling the rope, we hoisted away. It didn't help that the only likely tree we could find was barely big enough to hold the weight. We nearly snapped it in two before we got the food up. It didn't help that we had somehow left the fruit bag hanging down 4 feet below the rest of the bags, and when we got the rest of the stash up into the tree, the fruit was swinging slowly back and forth at a prefect height for a hungry bear. It definitely didn't help when half of us collapsed in laughter, or when Sally started taking pictures. But we persevered, and while we wouldn't have gotten an A on our result, our food cache was technically hanging from a tree, if nowhere near 12 feet up. In the morning, it was still there, unscathed and uneaten.There were 3 sailboats moored in the bay that night. They all had lights on at the top of their masts after dark, and as we looked across to other islands at night throughout the trip we could clusters of mast lights atop boats anchored in the bays and on lee shores.That night we had a discussion about what to do the next day. Our next night's campsite permit was on Sand, several islands away. We could either go straight there (13 miles) or go there via the sea caves on Devils Island (20 miles). We didn't make a final decision, but agreed to get up early the next morning and see how the weather was.
The Apostle Islands are a group (or archipelago) of 22 islands on Lake Superior, just offshore from Bayfield, Wisconsin, and about 90 miles east of Duluth. I was about to begin a 4 day/3 night camping/kayaking trip, paddling from island to island. My brother and nephew had been up in the Apostles in June with their boy scout troop, and it sounded quite wonderful. My brother recommended the outfitter (Living Adventure), and I signed up for a trip shortly after they returned. I had looked for a 4 day trip over the a full moon in August, which just happened to coincide with Living Adventure's women only "Archipelago" trip. Fortunately, I qualified.On the morning the trip started, I was excited and a bit apprehensive. I had been preparing for the trip for the last two months. Reading about the lake, the geology, the history. Building up my paddling. Tracing a map of the islands without the names to learn them. And yet ... I had been avoiding camping for a couple decades. How was that going to go? Would my 54 year old body that spent 5 days a week sitting at a desk hold up physically? Had I trained enough? Would that minor elbow pain get worse? What would the weather be like?
But the first day was gorgeous, and was an auspicious start to what turned out to be a truly magical trip.
We gathered at the Living Adventure facility just north of Bayfield at 8:30 on Thursday morning. There was Hovas, our guide. Mother and daughter Melissa and Becca. Friends Julie and Jodi. Sally from Milwaukee, and me. We collected our wet suits, life jackets and dry bags, packed our gear, and then headed out onto the water to practice our wet exits. After that we had lunch, and then we were off. The seven of us would be on our own for the next 4 days in two tandems and 3 single kayaks. We planned to spend the first night on Oak Island, the second on Rocky, and the third on Sand.
The first day's paddle was rough and mostly into the wind. I remembered how tired I had felt the first time I had been out kayaking this year, and was grateful that I wasn't tackling this paddle 3 months earlier.
We headed north along the coast of the mainland, into the wind and waves, ducking behind a dock to rest for a bit, and then later on making a landing on a beach for another short break. This was our roughest landing and launching of the trip, with an on-shore wind, and we picked up quite a bit of water just getting our spray skirts on and getting off the beach.We paddled by the wreck of the Fedora, a 282 foot long wooden steam freighter that went down in 1901 after a kerosene lamp tipped over in its engine room. The entire engine room was soon engulfed in flames, while the ship continued to run at full throttle. With few choices, the captain headed the ship to shore and ran it aground. We could see the outline of the ship under the waves and a few places where it broke the surface.
At the closest point to Oak Island, we left the mainland and headed out into the lake. The north wind finally eased off when we got into the lee of the island, and we paddled up the west shore to Campsite 2 by the dock. We learned the drill of carrying our kayaks up, unloading them and securing them for the night, then carrying all the gear to our campsite.
Our splendid guide soon had a fire going and baked whitefish under way, and we had a lovely dinner of fish tacos. The pesto tortillas, in what would become a standing joke, would be with us for several more meals. In fact, I think the wraps we had for lunch were pesto tortillas.
We went to sleep listening to the waves slosh and gurgle against the rocks just below our campsite. The next morning was another beautiful day, this time with little wind, and we stretched on the dock and picked thimble berries before heading off to Rocky via Otter.
