San Juan Islands Sea Kayaking from Anacortes

We just completed our annual guide training classes with the awesome kayak coaches from Body Boat Blade International. Regular readers of the Reports from the Field might see BBB mentioned quite often because they play a major role in both our personal and professional lives, and because they have been a driving force in helping us to develop our philosophy on safety and kayak guide training out here in the San Juan Islands.

This year's training was great, probably because we have assembled a fantastic bunch of talented kayakers which enabled us to work on many different situations.
In the turbulent waters of Deception Pass we practiced assisted rescues, self rescuing, towing scenarios, and how to more effectively control our kayaks in dynamic water. We also set up emegency situations (hypothermia, heart-attacks, etc) so that the guides would have the necessary experience to deal with them in the unlikely event that something should happen.
Although we would never purposefully take our guests out into rough conditions, our philosophy is that if we train our guides to be comfortable in the crazy stuff then anything they may encounter on a kayak tour should be a "walk in the park".
I'm pretty sure that our guests appreciate this.

In other news, the weather has been unbelievable for the last month! We've been enjoying summer like conditions for most of this Spring. I think that we are going on our 30th straight day without any measurable precipitation, and temperatures have soared into the 80's on many days.

We have been having outstanding wildlife sightings as well, seals and porpoise have been seen on nearly every trip, and we even had a Humpback whale swimming in Burrows Bay and down Burrows Channel last week! We think that there is a lot of baitfish out there in Rosario Strait and that may be bringing in the larger animals.
One species that has been conspicuously absent since Memorial Day Weekend are the Orca whales, they have only been seen in the San Juan Islands a few times over the last week. It is thought that the dry weather is keeping the river levels low which is preventing the salmon from moving into the waters surrounding the San Juans, this in turn is keeping the whales away. They are out there somewhere off the coast, happy and well fed, waiting for the salmon to come in.

Labels: kayak tours, San Juan Islands, sea kayaking