Yet once behind the island, I couldn’t find the cut. Several dead ends later— and after one quickly (but not quickly enough ) abandoned attempt to drag the kayaks through knee-deep mud—we gave up, turned the boats around, and paddled the long way back around the basin.

My first time paddleboarding, a friend and I were blown offshore by a wind that we hadn’t thought much about. We struggled to make it back to shore, alternating between kneeling and paddling prone on our stomachs to get out of the wind. We used buoys to mark our slow progress. At times, it felt like we weren't moving at all. 

At that point, we had been sea kayak guides for a while, so we understood the wind as it affects these longer, narrower boats. But we had failed to account for the fact that most paddleboards don’t move as efficiently as seakayaks, or kayaks generally. We made it back, but it was a good reminder that the same conditions don’t feel the same on every craft. 

As we rounded Eaglehead for the last stretch, we were met with a headwind we didn’t know to think about. The shoreline creeped by inches at a time. Our short and wide rec kayaks were ill-matched to this level of exposure (we’ll talk about boat/board choice next week), and we began thinking of ways we could  hop out and drag the kayaks along the steep rocky shore. However, a quick glance at the swell washing over the rocks put an end to that idea.