Paddle to West Point 3 June 2007

Tired of staying home and building the bistro table (which I had just completed the day before) and digging the buttercup weeds out of the "lawn", I suggested that we do a little kayak day trip. Since the weather was supposed to be unstable with the chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon, I picked something relatively close to home - West Point, which extends out from Discovery Park in Seattle. We drove along the waterfront where a cruise ship was loading passengers and across the Magnolia Bridge to Smith Cove Park but found that there was not an easy way to get down to water level (across boulders and then mud flats). We met another kayaker there. he had some other suggestions but I thought we'd try Commodore Park on the west end of the Ballard Locks on the south side of the Ship Canal. That worked well - parking, easy access to the water and no big openwater crossings to our destination. The only drawback was that the water level was way below what we had expected from our last trip on the Ship Canal. I must have read the tide table wrong, mixing up the A.M. and P.M., because I was expecting a high low tide but instead it was a minus tide. That also made the paddle past the mouth of the canal interesting because the sand bar on the south side extended far into bay and the mixed waves and wakes were breaking on the shallows. We gave that area a wide berth and stayed out farther than usual from the shore [Many of the places we have paddled have been along rocky cliffs where the depth drops off very quickly.] although we did paddle between some big boulders (glacial erratics?) in the water. There were lots of people walking on the beach and lots of motorboats, sailboats and some ships and barges out this Sunday. We paddled as far as the cliffs below the old sand dune HG launch at Discovery Park before turning back to have lunch on the north side of the point. By the time we had finished lunch, the tide had come up enough so that we could paddle across what had been sand just a couple of hours before. After getting the kayak out of the water and back up on the Outback, we stopped to tour Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center where we had a view down to part of the route where we had paddled (about 6 miles in total according the the GPS). There was also a nature trail with local plant species labeled with their uses by the native people.