Kayak Bill: A Requiem - Oct.2005 Sea Kayaker Magazine

After two days of drying gear out and watching the weather, I was out of bed just after 4:00 a.m., to cross Laredo Sound on a blue sky morning. The first breath of wind arrived just as I reached the ten kilometers of cliffs along the east side of the island. In minutes I located a Bill camp above a tiny beach in a break in the cliffs.
The camp was invisible from the water. Behind the bushes, a wall of driftwood three and a half meters high and six meters across protected the camp from prevailing winds. I continued southward into an archipelago dense with small rocky islands. Bill could safely paddle in here even in gale-force winds. He had situated his camps so he could sit out weeks of bad weather, waiting for the moment of calm, to make the exposed crossings.
After two and a half days of waiting at another of Bill's camps, the winds unexpectedly calmed. I paddled off in the late afternoon into a slow two-meter swell. A few kilometers out from shore, a light breeze swept a thin layer of fog towards me. Missing the islets would mean a frightening, miserable night bobbing around in the Pacific Ocean, but I had an unusual confidence about continuing.
Soon I was enveloped by fog, but instead of diminishing the light, the thin fog diffused and amplified it—while the bow of my kayak stood out with an intense clarity—everything above and around was suffused by a directionless whiteness. The fog obliterated the islets, but a shimmering golden line from the setting sun still shone through, the slowly undulating reflections acted as a beacon guiding me straight onwards. In the distance I could hear several immense humid whale breaths, a pause, and then a few more breaths, no way to tell how far off. I stopped my steady paddling pace once, to hear distant swell breaking on rocks ahead. Using my ears as sonar I swiveled my head from side to side, I was on track.
Twenty minutes later, I arrived exactly where and when I needed to be after four hours on a bearing of 270 degrees. As the larger outer islands were mostly exposed rock and surf, I had to enter the islets exactly at that place to paddle through a protected channel into the middle islet. And I had to arrive at high tide, for at low or even medium tide, a reef of several square kilometers around the islets dries, blocking the access. I made a right turn into a channel flanked by dark rocks, where the water immediately calmed. As the sun set a few bonsai-shaped trees were starkly outlined by the golden fog. Two white fishing floats tied to separate trees marked something.
Why would Bill put up markers in a place he didn't need to mark? Without those floats, I couldn't have found a place flat enough for my tent. As I walked along an overgrown trail to Bill's north camp, I had to veer around spiny Devil's club bushes. In the last twilight, I threw a tarp up over the three beams, sat down on his raised bed of fitted planks, and tore into a plastic pouch of organic, free-range, smoked chicken.
The next morning, it took me five minutes to locate Bill's south cabin. The north camp was a backup. A winter storm had once piled up waves high enough that Bill woke up in his cabin floating on his thin foam mattress, even though his bunk was two meters above high tide. Like his other camps, this was the size of a four meter by six meter plastic tarp. Unlike them, this place had a permanent roof with three and a half walls (the east wall was half open). Every piece of the cabin showed that it had been cast up by the sea.