At this point I was happily losing track of days. Tuesday we kayaked from Hyacinthe Bay past Open Bay towards but not to Village Bay. We saw bald eagles and some seals. RDC and I were in a tandem again and our strength and endurance, greater than those of the rest of the party, now swelled with day-trippers again, were showing. Tatsuro was in better shape than either of us but he was in a single.
A tandem gave RDC and me an advantage, but on this day we six--well, five, it was Tatsuro’s last day--decided that we would put our hind feet down to the hosts. We had all paid for tours that were customizable to our abilities, and RDC had twisted his ankle and didn’t want to hike, where Phil’s back protested against another day of kayaking. We saw no reason Coastal Spirits couldn’t give us two guides for two different parties.
I would like to state for the record that here, on a point of Quadra Island shore between Open Bay and Village Bay, I successfully skipped rocks for the first time ever. My mother has tried to teach me, RDC has tried to tell me, but me, I learned from Julie. RDC can send a rock out for yards before it touches down half a dozen times before sinking, and Phil got tremendous numbers of skips. Me, I got twosies and threesies, but after nearly 40 years of plunks, twosies and threesies were just fine.
So Tuesday afternoon we asserted ourselves, and Wednesday the Canadians hiked (poor Julie wanted to kayak) and RDC and I kayaked in a tandem with Bill in a solo. Bill is not only of course a superior paddler but also had a nifty, light little tight little tippy little craft, so we were well matched. We started in Granite Bay and paddled out to the mouth of Small Inlet. There, we saw seastars more than a foot across. We looked down through 40' of water to see kelp at the roots. The water was staggeringly clear, crystal, gorgeous, the most beautiful color, tremendously cold, and heart-rendingly lovely. We paddled up Small Inlet, seeing salmon jumping and bald eagles drying their feathers and seals spy-hopping (does it count as spy-hopping if it's not by whales?), more seastars, jellyfish Bill called moonjellies that he said had no sting (I didn't test this assertion) and looking at the remnants of old-growth forest on the very least accessible ridges and high points above us. When Bill was using a tree, he found a whole abalone shell in a midden. Another midden had been used for shellfish for thousands of years, he said; when I first saw it, it looked like snow.
At the head of Small Inlet, we found a spring Bill had never found before. When Bill put his hand to the ground, he startled a frog, who leaped to a branch over the surface. We saw water bubbling up through the mica-sifted bottom, and Bill filled his water bottle. I was tempted, but am not a native, and he's been drinking water from all over the islands, sources less pristine than this, for 20 years. And that water was cold. It felt just above freezing.