I’m sitting in a plastic chair in Pelican’s public laundry. The place has charts tacked to the walls, a space heater in the corner, and coin-op showers, mostly for fisherfolk coming in off of boats. …

We wake early, as we do every day. Usually we crawl into our sleeping bags by nine to get out of the wind that comes up after dinner. …

The water is mirror-smooth. An eagle circles, spirals, drops talon-first to glance the surface, rises away. I walk out over rain-slick rocks toward the point with the belching seals. They’re sunning in their improbable rock-top crescent balances, nose and tail pointed skyward.

Yesterday, we skimmed out to the head of…

I wake in the night and hear a sound. It’s like water in a kettle that’s about to boil, or a busy highway from down a canyon. Maybe it’s a jet flying overhead? Even here, we’ve seen a couple — but this doesn’t seem to change direction.

Or maybe it’s…

We’ve been feasting, here on our beach. The forage is good — fiddleheads, goosetongue, beach cabbage, wild parsley, mussels, morels — but the shrimping is even better.

A shrimp pot is a metal cage covered in a net that cinches at the bottom. We hang bait in the middle from…

When I woke up this morning, it was Not Raining! I refrained from further exclamation points to spare you, but reader, everything that's not wet is damp. We need a rain break.

Rick and Ryan were similarly bolstered by the just-okay weather, and so we decided to execute on our…

Today is the second day in a row that's so rainy we try not to leave our tents. The water has started to splash through the rainfly a little, tiny drops dotting my carefully dry warm things. All my raingear is still soaked through from yesterday, so it's a debate…

I bathed today! We hiked all morning in overcast, but in the afternoon, the sun came out. Rick and Ryan went to nap in their tents, so I siezed the fortunate convergence of events to get clean.

Each morning, I unbraid my hair, two long french pigtails, finger comb them…