By Leslee Jaquette
On that Thanksgiving weekend so many years ago, the Blake Island State Park Marina was empty except for our 26-foot sailboat. While angry, cold winds roared outside the breakwater, the kids presented a holiday puppet show in the magic glow of our single oil lamp. Our feast of Spanish rice, cooked on the propane stove and chased with chocolate chip cookies, couldn’t have been more scrumptious.
This is just one precious memory of Blake Island State Park that makes it my favorite, off-season, family boating getaway in the world. For decades, during the nine months when there are more deer than people on the island, we capitalized on the island’s easy access to provide us with what felt like our own private, nature preserve.
Blake Island is located about eight miles from Seattle’s Shilshole Bay Marina. I agree with State Park Manager Pete Wood when he observes, “It’s such a unique gem because there are no other undeveloped islands accessible to the boating public in Puget Sound. Here, we can be in the middle of a deep dark forest and look out at the Seattle skyline and Mount Rainier and say, ‘This is what it was like in prehistory.”
With an area of one-square-mile, Blake Island State Park remains mostly underutilized except for the summer months. Then, the sleepy first-come, first-served, 1,500-feet of marina dock is transformed. “It’s a zoo,” says Paul Rupert, head ranger Blake Island State Park. “It’s so wild that people bring lawn chairs to watch the new boaters land.”
Even back in the 1970’s and 80’s this was the case. As a result, we rarely visited the island during the summer. Instead, our memories of stolen weekends in the off-season are filled with a sense of remoteness that is usually reserved for more farfetched destinations.
I recall one late winter weekend on Blake Island when Bill stayed onboard after dinner to tidy up so I could take the kids ashore before story and bedtime. Adam must have been a toddler because I was still toting him about in a backpack. Roger was probably six. We had recently read Roald Dahl’s wonderful book about a gamekeeper and his son and it affected what happened when we scrambled up a sandy cliff. It seems that, suddenly, we found ourselves abreast of a grizzly scene.
Shocked at the sight of a dead deer with no head, I screamed dramatically, “Poachers!” While Roger might have made the connection with Dahl’s book, baby Adam wailed in terror, more at my outburst than from the macabre scene. While the incident failed to scratch even the shallowest psychological scar, the boys still love to tease me about my theatrics.
Our family also still cherishes one particularly elegant Easter weekend when we had Blake Island to ourselves. The boys were getting older, Roger was 12 and Adam was eight. Sure, the annual egg dying and backyard egg hunts in the backyard had become a bore. Still, they complained when we planned a sailing trip on a weekend when, however pedestrian the event, they were entitled to run amuck like booty-driven barbarians.
Little known to them, their resourceful mama had purchased 200 new plastic eggs and filled them with Hershey Kisses, Peanut Butter Cups, fake tattoos, marbles and plastic toys from Archie McPhee’s. So early that sunny Easter Sunday Bill rowed the dinghy to the spit on the northwest corner of the island and planted the colorful eggs amongst tons of stinky, slimy flotsam.
After breakfast we hit the beach for our usual morning exploration and surprised the kids by handing them bags and simple instructions, “You each get 100 eggs.”
With the instincts of Blackbeard, they ransacked the spit, overturning sodden logs, uncovering plastic eggs under jellyfish and piles of seaweed. Red-cheeked and soaking wet, it probably took them an hour to find the eggs and another hour to admire the contents. Now ages 33 and 29, they recall that inspired egg hunt as one of the most fun times of their youth.
When the lads were a bit older during our 18-foot powerboat phase, we camped overnight several times in the fall and spring months on Blake Island. Naturally, we would pick a weekend with what looked like reasonable conditions and take off with the tents, sleeping bags and lots of chow. If the weather got really ugly, we could pack up and go home in a heartbeat. That is, if it wasn’t too windy.
One time the weather didn’t cooperate, so we rescued what was turning into a miserable evening with a big night out. We zippered up the tent and invested in the Tillicum Village Northwest Indian-style salmon bake and stage show. The food was excellent, the show engaging. By the time we headed back to the beach; the weather and our attitudes had improved immeasurably.
Recently after a decade-long hiatus, I returned to Blake Island on assignment for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. I was to write the lead feature about the state park, a boating story to serve as a prelude to Opening Day for the Getaways section. However bittersweet it may have been to cruise to the island on a yacht without husband or kids, it still felt wonderful to return home to Blake Island.
While it was satisfying to interview intrepid boaters about their off-season, Blake Island experiences, what I really wanted to do was lose the P-I photographer. I wanted to run the trail around the island, just as I had as a young mother 20 years before. I wanted to melt back in time, surprise some deer and admire my men folk as they mounted a last-ditch effort to protect their sand castle from the inevitable. But that was then and thank goodness it was so wonderful.
On the motor back to Seattle, I collected my treasured thoughts and counted my Blake Island blessings. I recalled how our weekends spent boating, camping, clam digging and beachcombing at this unusual and mostly wild state park represent for me and my family the very best of the boating experience.
Here, we found an easy escape from the hassles and humdrum of everyday life. On Blake Island in the off-season, we made time to enjoy the best of times.
INFORMATION: Blake Island State Park (360) 731-8330 or Washington State Parks (360) 902-8844; www.parks.wa.gov; blake.island@parks.wa.gov
