Sea Kayak - Cape Flattery - in the FOG

Trip Report

Venue and Conditions:

• 5 experienced sea kayakers going to Cape Flattery in Foggy Conditions without GPS.
• Visibility was often only 100+/- yards; sometimes 1/2 to 1 nm during day.
• Wind moderate. Swell created very dynamic waters on coast. "Low High" tide was mid-day.

Key Recommendations:

• Patience: Be cautious with launch time. We waited 2 hours after planned launch to see how Fog changed.
• Compare Deck Compasses before launch. Line up all boats with deck compasses in parallel and compare for accuracy.
• Sync Watches too: to assure time alignment.
• Have backup hardware and plan: Bring a GPS and InReach as backup - even if you don't plan to use them. (We brought but didn't use.)  And let others at basecamp know by when they should start a search if you don't return by a max time.
• Go Step-by-Step: We decided to take incremental steps with distinct bearings to take a wide reach around Waatch Point (where there is boomer and underwater rockshore danger).  We chose 250 magnetic for 20 min (roughly 1 nm) from Hobuck Beach near campsites, as there are few rocks for visible contrast at Waatch Point. And then 320 magnetic for 50 min (roughly 2.5 nm) up to the first visible pillars before Fuca Pillar, where there are distinct rocks for contrast set off the coastline.
• Willingness to Retreat: We pre-agreed to return on the same path, if the fog became thicker and non-navigable. 
• Keep a tight pod: We stayed within a few boat lengths of each other to maximize verbal communication. When people are more tired, consider putting the slowest paddler in the lead to set the pace, and the fastest paddler as the sweep. We successfully applied this technique to keep us relatively tight on the return.
• Talk often: We frequently exchanged perceptions (e.g. current heading from deck compass; slight opening/closing of blue skies; shoreline visibility of rocks in distance or ridgelines, etc)
• Modify heading in realtime:  We willingly and frequently adjusted heading periodically and slightly (by 10 or 20 degrees), positively or negatively in either direction, to stay in visible range of coast when possible.
• Look for signals close by: Bruce identified bull kelp floating in our direction on way up, and also noted the blades weren't actively floating near the top, indicating a slight but not strong current assist on our path.
• Look for openings to the "Inside": Even though it was very foggy and there was a lot of dynamic white water crashing swell around it, Brian identified the ideal "green water" route into the Inside, just before James Rock, where we could go into the ideal calm beach near the isthmus. The shoreline was too busy to enter the "Inside" passageways around Fuca Pillar.
• Plan return route: At lunch we mentally calculated and noted our return route so we did not have to discuss on the noisy water (subtracting 180 from each to get 140 magnetic from Fuca Pillar area, before a final 70 magnetic turn into Hobuck for landing).
• Play while there! Conditions were changing often but we earned a couple hours of rock gardening, cave exploration, arch passageways and dynamic water. Be ready to return on moment's notice.
• Guesstimate your distance via the Conditions: During the return, although we noticed we had a light wind largely at our backs heading SE, a slight ebb underneath us, and the NW swell supporting our SE direction, we didn't mentally note that we likely could spend slightly less time than the 50 min outbound on the first major leg of our return from Fuca Pillar area. As a result we overshot our final landing slightly, ending up a 1/2nm south of our launch spot on Hobuck Beach. The coastal fog was so thick we could not see any distinguishing features on the beach, to separately determine how far N or S we were, even after we saw a close-in surfer. We even thought we had landed N of our intended spot and so began to drag our boats S until we conferred with a beach walker. The fog on the S end of the beach was that thick. We landed with less than 100 yards of visibility.
• Be wary of Waatch Point on return: The upside of our conservative return was that we did NOT get caught in known rocky area and boomers at Waatch Point. Be aware that multiple trips to Cape Flattery by some of us, has identified a common pattern of NW swell creating giant sweeping swells that can carry unwitting kayakers into the Waatch Point area as they return to Hobuck. This has happened even when experienced kayakers thought they were well past the danger area.

PICS:

1. General Visibility was Low:

2. Sometimes the fog opened up closeby but still foggy in the distance:

3. We had fun exploring once there:

4. Lunch time at ideal protected cove:

5. Smiling Bruce, Tongue expressing Brian, First time at Cape Flattery Steve, Benj in the Shadow, and Alan.

Overall approximate route:

Cheers all!

Have Fun, Safely!

Map