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.
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