My first impression of Decatur Island, upon spotting a sprawling farmhouse, cherry trees in full bloom with black-faced sheep grazing beneath them in sunny Sylvan Cove, was pastoral. And inviting! Homes, some of them built by award-winning architects, peek at you from among towering Douglas fir trees surrounding the bay. Use your imagination to springtime this photo, taken later in the summer.
Steep hills, forested with evergreens, surround two pristine lakes, Horseshoe Lake and Spencer Lake, nestled in the middle of this private island. Its residents, many of them wealthy, enjoy the convenience of electricity, a general store, cafe, and post office. They travel to and from the mainland by water taxis, private boat, or airplane. In fact, Blakely Island, the sixth largest island in the San Juan Islands, is the only non-ferry island to maintain a private paved and lighted airstrip for its residents. The small Blakely Island Marina, on the other hand, allows transient boaters to tie up as guests.
Waldron Island is one of the outer primitive islands that is a bit “off the grid” and its full-time and seasonal residents like their independent, self-sufficient lifestyle. Most of the families, some of them fourth-generation homesteaders, retrieve their water from private wells and their power from solar panels, wind generators, and gas or diesel generators. There are no public utilities on the island, although they do maintain an ambulance and firetruck.
Anchorage at beautiful Matia Island is enjoyable, yet it depends on favorable weather in Rolfe Cove. In 1792, Spanish explorer, Francisco de Eliza, accurately named the island Matia, meaning “no protection.” Exposed to northwest and west wind, waves can build and break an anchor free from the rocky bottom, sending a vessel on a collision course with a neighbor’s boat or worse…the shore. For this reason, every winter when stormy weather prevails between October and March, Washington State Marine Parks removes the dock and floats.
Zipping through Active Cove, a cozy anchorage, in our neighbor’s 16-foot Safeboat gave me a glimpse of Patos Island. And a desire to return someday soon to one of the most scenic islands in the San Juan Islands.
Sandstone walls ring the small bay and a sandy beach lies at its head where a trail head invites exploration. At the island’s western tip on Alden Point stands Patmos Island lighthouse, made famous by a book written in 1951 by Helene Glidden called The Light on the Island. One of thirteen children, she chronicles her childhood, blending fact and fiction, while her father served as lighthouse keeper from 1905-1913. Together with an assistant keeper, her father rescued the crew of a shipwrecked tugboat with its tow, a large barge, drifting nearby and ready to meet the same fate.
In 1893, the U.S. Lighthouse Board erected a red light on a post accompanied by a third-class Daboll trumpet fog signal and five years later enclosed it in a small red and white one-story building. But complaints that the light was invisible to ships led to the construction of a 38-foot tower, encircled with a balcony, in 1908. Eventually, the oil-burning wicks were replaced with a flashing light and a fourth-order Fresnel lens, turned by a combination of weights and chains similar to a large clock. A new fog signal was added at the same time.
The lighthouse was automated in 1974 and it is now a lone sentry. The handsome two-story keeper’s house and other outbuildings no longer exist. Since the photo below was taken, the lighthouse has been restored by the nonprofit organization, Keepers of Patos Light. The charter schooner, Zodiak, out of Bellingham, WA, is in the background.
Designated a Washington State marine park, Patos Island feels remote because anchorage is limited to approximately a half-dozen boats and their crew. A portion of the island is a Federal Wilderness Area, so public access is restricted to 110 of its 208 acres where visitors can camp, fish for halibut and salmon in the surrounding waters, and explore tide pools.
Patos in Spanish means “ducks” and a variety of seabirds breed here, including ducks and puffins, but especially seagulls.
When I think of Patos Island’s lighthouse keepers, men and women who stood watch to keep others safe, I imagine they possessed great skill, courage, and determination. With little warning, they might be asked to rescue a ships’ crew in distress at the peril of their own lives. Serving others is a high calling.
Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.
(Matthew 5:16, NKJV)
Thanks for reading!
Blessings,
Deb Garland
Patos Island at the North Edge of the San Juan Islands
Smugglers on Sucia Island? Following our first sail to the island in the early 1980s, I read about a man who’d settled on South Finger Island in Echo Bay the prior winter. He believed that he’d found a remote spot to run drugs between the United States and Canada. What he didn’t know is that in the spring, many boaters would visit their favorite Washington State Marine Park located 2.5 (4.0 km) north of Orcas Island and his hideout would be discovered by the authorities. Keep in mind, this occurred before many guidebooks had been published and communication was minimal.
We squeezed our first sail to the San Juan Islands into Christmas vacation in the middle of my third year of teaching. Weather proved to be windy and wet, so we donned our foul weather gear. And when we arrived, we anchored in the middle of protected Reid Harbor on Stuart Island. Of course, this photo is from a different trip in the summer.
Lopez Island is the first island on the Washington State Ferries route into the San Juan Islands from Anacortes. It is the third largest island, looks like the letter “L” from the air, and is known as the “friendly” island. Residents wave to motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians, often catching visitors by surprise.
San Juan, Orcas, Shaw, and Lopez islands beckon to visitors sailing aboard the Washington State Ferries from Anacortes, WA and Sidney, BC, Canada on Vancouver Island year around, with the exception of no ferry service from Canada during the cold winter months.
Sail or fly into the San Juan Islands of Washington State and you are immediately struck by the rugged beauty of the archipelago’s shoreline. Twice daily tides, sometimes rising 13 feet, splash the 479 miles (769 km) of rocky headlands and pebble shell beaches of approximately 400 islands, 128 with names. Overhanging Madrona trees, their gnarled trunks encircled in ochre bark, fringe snug harbors and open coves where harbor seals snatch salmon for supper. Black Oystercatchers pluck a banquet of mussels, limpets, and chitons from nearby reefs with their bright red beaks. And people from all walks of life come to enjoy the slower-paced lifestyle, afoot or afloat, in God’s creation.
