We're back! (kayak trip pt 1)

We're back from our great kayaking adventure! In 2009, 7 of us went on a 4 day kayaking trip around San Juan Island. It was so awesome that we decided we wanted to do it again sometime. But in 2010 Jackie and Dave got married (and we had babies), in 2011 Evan and Alyssa got married (and our kids were only a year old), but this year we decided to just do it (lots of thanks to both blake and my parents for babysitting all weekend)!

The 2009 group was me, Blake, Brianne, Danielle, Jackie, Evan, and Darren. We also had 4 strangers on our trip plus a guide, Tim. In 2012 Darren was lame and didn't join us again, but everyone else came again, and Alyssa and Dave joined us as well, so we were a group of 8. Tim, the guide/owner is transitioning from guiding to the office-work part of ownership (he's old-ish), and this was his last 3 day trip, so he brought along 3 guides-in-training for their last training run before he sends them off to lead trips on their own.

My initial idea was to post 10 pics from each day, but I took a first pass at that for the first day and now I'm too lazy to narrow it down to just 10 pics. So here are 18 pics from the first day. Enjoy!

Jackie and Dave on the ferry ride over to San Juan Island

Alyssa (and Dave) sitting in the kayaks on land adjusting pedals and such before we launched

Blake on the water!

lots of seals

one of the islands we stopped at (I think it was Turn Island?). those are our kayaks below; we're standing at the top of a hill that we hiked up before hiking around the island.

dave, jackie, danielle, evan, alyssa, brianne, rp (guide), tara (guide), ian (guide), tim (guide)

Yellow Island. another island we stopped at to take a little hike and gather firewood. Yellow Island is a little funny in that it has a few rules. Like you can't eat on the island, so we all sat in our kayaks and snacked a bit before landing on the island, and you have to get to the island before 4:00pm. We arrived in the area around 3:55, so we snacked quickly, and then landed at 3:59 so we could go on our hike and then leave again.

We spent the night on Jones Island. We had a campsite reserved so we set up camp and started making dinner.
In this pic we have Tara (guide) in the green shirt, then Alyssa, Ian (guide), and me. Ian and I were in charge of buttering the bread. Complex work.

RP serenaded us as we prepped dinner. Sometimes he sang "real" songs, but most often he sang Flight of the Concords songs which were, of course, very funny.

alyssa slicing tomatoes for the salad

pasta, pasta, and more pasta. tim asked if we wanted 4 or 5 boxes of pasta (for the 12 of us) and people answered 5 boxes. so we ate a lot of pasta.

in fact, 5 boxes of pasta may have been too much. evan volunteered to finish it off and that may have been an unwise decision.

after dishes, we all relaxed and sat around. evan's hammock didn't want to stay up, so he lay in it like that.

then we bundled up and hiked around the island to watch the sunset. which was behind the clouds. but we still had a nice little hike.

alyssa and ev on the sunset hike