Get to Know Camano Island... Paddle the Perimeter!

Join the ranks of Camano Circumnavigators and see our island home from a whole new perspective. This article will give you some tips on exploring this place by water... and explain why it is so important to do so.

Does it sometimes feel like this isn't really an island at all, but just a neutral backdrop for over 10,000 busy lives? It's easy to fall into habits, no longer noticing our unique environment when it's obscured by the daily noise of commuting, shopping, and dealing with the countless demands of a stressful existence. This is not only a shame from the personal perspective, but it contributes directly to a much more insidious problem: rampant growth.

You see, the battle to preserve the rural nature of Camano island is dependent, more than anything else, on people appreciating it. Only that can tip the scales against the implacable forces of commercial development, resource extraction, and suburbanization... for those things are driven by profit, and the players are professionals at the game. How can we fight back, as a diverse population of individuals with plenty of other priorities? With few exceptions, we are not wealthy people; it's a losing battle if measured in purely economic terms.

But we do have one powerful asset: a population of island residents who have the potential to exert significant public opinion... in the voting booth, the S/C News letters column, written comments to County government, and through organizations like CARE that can, when needed, focus community awareness into a sharp-edged legal sword. All of which is great, but first, people have to love this place enough to recoil when it's invaded, like a massive antibody reaction to a pathogen.

This may seem a radical introduction to a story about kayaking, but I'm not talking about paddlesports, nor about vacation destinations. What I'm proposing here is that all of us start taking the time to get to know Camano island more intimately: its quirky historical details, interesting trails, colorful characters, aquifers, wildlife, native plant species, weather patterns, and coastline. Only by getting to know it at this level can we, as a community, understand that we are the stewards of something precious and worth protecting. When someone proposes a water-wasting boondoggle on 532 to make a fast buck or turns yet another diverse forest into a dead stump farm, we need to respond with raw anger, as one, feeling the assault in our collective gut and doing our best to make things VERY expensive and painful for the perpetrator.

But you can't get rid of community apathy by simply pointing it out; change must come from within every island resident. If not, this place will become a sad sprawl before we even realize it. Let's talk about one particularly delightful way to get to know Camano better.

Exploring the Shoreline

When you drive west from Stanwood on Route 532, Camano doesn't feel much like an island You cross a languid river, as often as not a muddy channel you could slog across in hip boots, and then it's sort of Snohomish County, continued. The island itself begins at a tiny bridge over a barely noticeable ditch, the county seat is somewhere over on Whidbey, only one of our commissioners even lives here, and there's a feeling of being an appendix dangling off the mainland (the First People even named it Kol-lut-chen, or "Land-jutting-out-into-a-bay"). Well, we may have quirky geography and seriously broken districting, but from a nautical and environmental perspective this is a pretty interesting place.

A sailor's first impulse on seeing any island is to sail around it, of course, but that's not so easy here. The northernmost 3-4 miles of Port Susan (between Camano and the mainland) dries to mudflats at low tide, as does the south end of Skagit Bay east of Brown Point. Deep-draft sailboats don't stand a chance, and even a powerboater with local knowledge must be extremely tide conscious and aware of the undersea topography.

But kayaks and canoes are perfect for this sort of thing, and offer the added advantages of being quiet, inexpensive, and intimate in the sense that you have a very personal relationship with the area you are paddling through. You can drift past wildlife, unobtrusive, with no obnoxious sounds and fumes creating a perceptual barrier between you and nature. And there is a wonderful sense of accomplishment in covering territory under your own muscle power, especially when it gives you a new perspective on a place you call home.

The full loop around Camano Island is between 40-50 miles, depending on how closely you hug the shoreline, and although it has been done in one day by hard-core paddlers, I certainly don't recommend that if your goal is more exploratory than athletic. A better approach to getting to know the place is to note all your available access points on a map, then collect "segments" as weather and current conditions dictate. In addition to your own circle of waterfront friends and a few "members only" locations like the Yacht Club and Country Club, here are the most useful public accesses (proceeding counterclockwise around the island

• Utsalady Bay
• Maple Grove, east of Rocky Point
• Madrona
• Camano Island State Park, including a Marine Trail campsite
• Mabana
• Tyee
• Tillicum
• Cavalero County Park
• Iverson Spit (Long Beach)
• Livingston Bay
• Davis Slough
• Leque Island
• English Boom

Since this can be done rather casually as a series of moderate day-paddles, this expedition is not particularly equipment-intensive. While one can spend a few thousand on a kayak and related gear, many of our friends have gotten years of adventure out of $400 inflatables and used boats (plentiful in this part of the country). With all the kayaking resources on the web, I won't go into details... only suggesting that the most important part is actually getting on the water, not focusing on the right gear.

A Personal Perspective

And that brings us back the real point of all this: getting on the water. I recently completed the circumnavigation, and I can say without hesitation that it has completely changed my perception of Camano Island. I now know, when driving along some road with a view, what it feels like out there and what it's like to look back at the shore. I've stepped foot on places that are hard to reach any other way... like the beach at the south tip, or some perfect little unnamed lunch spot at the base of an eroded high-bank cliff where you look up to see a lone Madrona barely clinging to existence, jutting horizontally into space. I've crossed Utsalady Bay in the dark on a winter evening, bundled in warm clothing, hearing the distant roar of traffic and mesmerized by the ring of shorelights and their dancing reflections. I've been so hot while paddling languidly from Cavalero to Tyee that I clipped the bow line to my waist and tumbled overboard to slowly swim, towing my boat. I've camped at the Cascadia Marine Trail site at the State Park, sated by a Thai Panang curry conjured on my campstove, sitting at midnight with a laptop on a driftwood log on Saratoga Passage... a brisk northerly playing with my hair, the moon and Mars floating together above the distant skyglow of Seattle, fish splashes and seal breath punctuating the restful lappings of wavelets on the shore.

These are the moments when we forget the clutter and noise of life and are just here. Our mental maps of Camano have evolved from spider-web images of a road network to an organic and complete image of an island complete with offshore depth contours, micro-climates, wildlife, intertidal species, and sweeping vistas of distant mountains or nearby forests. We have shared some exquisite moments just bobbing along the shore, connecting the dots, seeing things from a different perspective, enjoying each others' company. We stop now and then to visit with waterfront folks or beach strollers, lounge on shore, or get to know the critters. And in the evening, we document the day's adventure in a maplet and post stories and pictures on our personal websites... already planning the next journey.

Somehow, this whole process has restored something of the wildness of this island for otherwise we just see it from the ordered perspective of drivers and homeowners. When we see people unthinkingly dumping chemicals on their lawns to impose an artificial monoculture, clearing century-old firs from a beautiful 10-acre site for "the view," throwing their trash in the woods to avoid dump fees, or scheming to suck irrational amounts of water out of our sole-source aquifer, we now respond as if personally affronted... for we've seen first-hand that this is a home worth protecting: a fragile place in the Sound, not just another suburban sprawl.

If the idea of exploring Camano Island in this way intrigues you, I invite you to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . We welcome folks to join us on casual day trips, and it's always a pleasure to hear from those who have covered the same territory. I'm working on a little "Camano Circumnavigator" graphic that we might put onto a T-shirt or coffee mug, and this is the sort of thing that just might call for a get-together at the park some afternoon. And, if floating offshore and looking back at the island stirs something within you, please consider joining CARE to help protect this place!