The only creek we could find near us in Icy Cove was a trickle of brown tannin water. Joe Petolino tried making a little drinking water from it and had to clean his filter after every liter. After tossing out four liters of water the night before, I used up the last drop of my water on breakfast. I decided to wait and get some water later. After all, this is Alaska and there will be cascades of clear water bubbling down the next cliff. We had been warned that there was no water available at our next campsite, but there were two creeks between us and there.
The first creek turned out to be a wide river of muddy silt-laden water coming out between a cluster of cabins. In typical Alaskan fashion people had parked all their old dead cars and tractors behind their cabins in anticipation of fixing them one day. Some of the cabins were mansion sized, but were not finished yet. They'll get around to putting windows on the south side one day. I wondered if their septic systems were dumping into the river, so I paddled as far upstream as I could and started pumping water through my filter, since I was desparate. I was the first one to get to the river and everyone else told me I was crazy. This water was going to clog up your filter. Why not wait until we get to a nice clear creek? This is Alaska and there will be cascades of clear water bubbling down the next cliff. I got a liter of water out of the river which I sorely needed the rest of the day. Nobody else bothered.
When we came around one point our view suddenly opened up. The sky was clear and we could see the row of huge snow-capped mountains inland from us. Now something we should have seen on our maps also became clear. We were paddling up the shore of a long low peninsula. It was too low for snow to collect and there wasn't going to be any clear snowmelt creeks bubbling down the cliffs. The only water on this peninsula was rain water that filtered itself through the forest duff until it came out the creeks as brown tannin tea emptying into the ocean. This was the only water we were going to get for the next few days. When we got to the last little tannin creek before our campground everyone realized that we all desperately needed some and this was it. We stopped at this creek and everyone sat down to pump water. Every liter of water clogged up the filters and we had to take them apart and clean them. It took a few hours for each of us to make four or so liters each.
By the time we had enough drinking water the tide had gone way out and we had a difficult time getting the kayaks back into deep enough water to launch. This delayed us even longer. Late in the evening we came to Wood Point only to discover that it had a huge shallow reef on the west end that we had to paddle way around at low tide. The day had been warm but the sun was low in the sky. As we rounded the corner at the top of the point a cold wind came down Thomas Bay from the Baird Glacier and made several of us sorry we packed our warm drytops away in our kayaks somewhere. This was another point that Scott the outfitter had placed his two-mile-wide finger on and said "Yes, you can camp here". Jesse Meyer was convinced that the center of Scott's finger landed on the east side of the point, so we passed up a nice looking sandy beach at the tip of Wood Point. Don Fleming and I paddled two miles ahead and landed in a bunch of places looking for enough room in the Forest Primevil for our tents again. John Somers had maps with GPS co-ordinates of recommended camping places from the Forest Service. But he had stayed behind to pump more water and was not available to help us. After another two hours of searching we went back to the sandy beach on the tip of the point and found John there. This was the correct place all along.
I cooked dinner that evening, making Thai green curry with chicken. On previous trips I had used success rice or instant rice. But Joe Petolino complained that "real rice" was much better and didn't use up much more fuel. So I made a big batch of real jasmine rice, only to discover that it didn't cook well in a thin-walled aluminum pot over a camp-stove. The rice in the center and the top of the pot was done while the rice around the side in the bottom was uncooked. Sorry Joe, but I'm switching back to instant rice next time. As the cook, I didn't finish setting up my camp or putting things away until after midnight again. We finally realized that our late launches were making our evening camps miserable to set up. Despite the long hours of sunlight we were going to have to get ourselves going early every morning.