[I want to state at the outset that the wisdom of a paddling trip like this -- alone & at night -- is debatable (see comments at the end) and I would not recommend for anyone else to do it. Everybody has to be responsible for assessing their situation, their equipment, and their own limits, and making their own judgments.]

I had wanted to explore Gailliard Island ever since a brief visit there in September 96. Work, weather, modifications to my spray skirt, and other things had prevented me from making the trip before Winter arrived. The idea of being splashed with icy cold water pushed by frigid winds held no appeal for me, so I was resigned to not getting to visit the island again until Spring. But then in early December the weather reversed itself -- we had two weeks of warm, sunny days. I made plans to go to Mobile for the weekend and spend at least part of the weekend kayaking. My son couldn't go, so I decided to go alone.

Saturday the 14th arrived, and I was still not quite ready. A preliminary outing on a local lake revealed that the Jocassee's spray skirt still dribbled water through the velcro strip where the two halves of the spray skirt were joined. I spent Saturday adding an aluminum bow under the velcro to discourage pooling there. A cold front was closing in from the West, and it looked as if Sunday would be the last warm weather we would have. I loaded the kayak Saturday night and made plans to leave Sunday morning.

Sunday morning telephone calls, poor organization, and last-minute searches for equipment put off my departure until almost lunch time. Delays on the highway put me even farther behind schedule, and I didn't arrive at Mobile Bay until 4:00 p.m. -- about an hour before sunset. It is about 2.5 nautical miles to the north side of the island, so I decided that I would at least paddle out and then come back in the twilight. I had packed a blanket, some food, water, and matches, just in case I decided to spend the night out there instead. I got the kayak in the water, loaded, and underway by 4:15. I only had time to take one snapshot before it became too dark (the island is barely visible on the horizon in the right half of the picture).

Gailliard Island bears about 140 degrees from the little beach at the end of Hammock Road, where I put in. The wind was coming out of the east, and two or three-foot swells were coming from the same direction. The waves were steep-sided and close together. Each time the Jocassee's bow dropped over the crest of one wave, it slammed down on the crest or face of the next one, throwing up a cloud of spray which blew into my face. Often the bow would penetrate just below the wave crest, and water would roll back across the foredeck and cascade off the sides. The farther out into the bay I got, the steeper the waves seemed, and the harder the wind blew. It reached the point where the surfaces of the waves were ruffled all over by the wind and spray, and looked as if rain were falling around me. The few sailboats that had been out in the bay when I put in were heading in to Dog River now, but there was a shrimp boat anchored near the northeast corner of the island, where I was heading.

About halfway to the island, I noticed a bright, pulsing light low in the sky to the north. Watching closely, I realized that a fireworks display was being staged somewhere in the vicinity of eastern Mobile, probably at Battleship Park. From my position, 10 or 12 miles away, there was no sound, but the glowing fireballs and brightly colored skybursts were beautiful to watch. Unfortunately, each time I paused in paddling, the wind and waves quickly brought the kayak's forward momentum to a halt, so I could only enjoy the fireworks in brief glimpses.

I drew near the anchored shrimp boat about 5:00. The sun was setting and it was beginning to get dark, but the sky was almost clear, and the moon was bright and half-full overhead. The island was only a couple of hundred yards off, and the waves and wind were diminished here. The cabin was lighted up on the shrimper, but no-one was visible on deck. It was time to decide where to go from here.

I didn't feel like going right back where I had just come from, and didn't care to just go ashore on the same side of the island Brandon and I had already visited. So I decided to push on around to the eastern side and explore a little before it got really dark -- maybe find the entrance to the central lagoon shown on my sectional charts.

A big seagoing tug was pushing some barges down the Mobile ship channel less then a mile away. I could hear its engines over the sounds of the wind and waves, and as I watched, its navigation lights came on. Several miles behind it, to the north, a huge freighter was also heading south toward the Gulf. As I started south, a few yards off the eastern shore of the island, the tug and its barges were receding in the distance. I looked around to the north and was surprised at how quickly the freighter was approaching -- it was moving much faster than I had expected. Due to the way the ship channel passes close by Gailliard Island, it looked almost as if the freighter were bearing down on me, but thank goodness I knew better.

The east side of the island seemed to be one long, steep pile of big rocks. Grass, shrubs, and trees grew above the rocks, and the waves were breaking against the rocks at the bottom. There were no sand beaches visible. The waves and wind were coming in almost directly against my port side. With steady, continual paddling, I was having no trouble holding my course, just offshore, but occasionally a rogue wave crest would splash up and over the left side of the kayak instead of passing under it. The water was not terribly cold, and the wind wasn't bothering me at all, even though I had not put on my jacket or cap. The exertion of paddling was apparently keeping me warm.

As the big freighter drew abreast of me, probably a half-mile away, I began to think about when its wake would arrive and how high it might be. Shortly thereafter, what I took for the bow-wave arrived with a roaring sound clearly audible over the sounds of the waves striking the rocks to starboard. It lifted the kayak sharply, but posed no problem. The surface was dark now, and it was hard to make out the waves as they came in. A series of steep ones that swept out of the darkness a few minutes later was probably the wake of the freighter.

Now there was what looked like a big pile of lights coming down the channel from the north. As it drew closer and began to be visible from the side, it turned out to be a cruise ship, with lights showing everywhere. As it passed by, I was reminded of the movie "A Night to Remember" and thought the Titanic must have looked something like that in the dark. I imagined for a moment being out on the North Atlantic in a small lifeboat -- not a cheery thought!

A cold trickle on my shin drew my attention to the water in front of me on the spray skirt. I had a disposable camera, a map case, and a small compass resting there, and their combined weight seemed to be helping to pool water on the spray skirt until it seeped through the velcro'd closure over the front paddling position. Obviously, I needed a better arrangement there. I was in no position to rearrange equipment at the time -- still struggling along a rocky lee shore, with steep waves coming in from the side -- so I just paddled on. Intermittently, small formations of big pelicans passed low overhead, silent and gray in the light of the half-moon. The shoreline began to turn toward the south-southwest. I decided to continue on around the whole island rather than to turn around and go back the way I had come.

I had still seen no sign of a break in the shoreline to indicate an entrance to the central lagoon. I began to suspect that the island is not accurately depicted on the sectional chart. The shoreline began to run in a southwestern direction, and lights on the western shore of Mobile Bay began to be visible again. The rocks on the shore were no longer piled up, and in some places there appeared to be small spaces between some of them. Behind them there appeared to be flat surfaces reflecting white in the moonlight. They might have been sand flats or small inland pools. Or they might have been part of a lagoon. There was still no sign of a channel inward. Anyway, the channel depicted on my sectional chart was shown on the northeastern portion of the island, and I was now approaching the southern end.

As I approached the southernmost point, the crashing sound of waves breaking on the rocks to my right suddenly began to be balanced by roaring from my left. The bottom here apparently changes from a steep drop-off to flat and shallow, and the incoming waves were piling up and breaking as they approached the shore. The first couple of breakers caught me unprepared and left me within paddle-reach of the rocks to my right. I struggled to get the bow turned out into the oncoming breakers that were barely visible as long ridges of water rolling out of the darkness to seaward. After crashing dramatically through three or four of them, with a couple of crests rolling all the way up the deck to splash into my chest, I was outside the breaking zone. I soon passed into calmer waters off the southern side of the island. I was about 50 yards off what appeared to be a flat shore here, and was just rocking gently in small waves. I decided to take a break and reorganize myself.

Reaching behind me to pop open the rear of the spray skirt, I felt water pooled on the skirt. I foolishly assumed this to be a negligible amount. The Jocassee spray skirt reaches back two or three feet behind the central paddling position. As I slipped the side of the skirt loose and reached into the cockpit behind me, a torrent of what seemed like several gallons of cold water streamed over my hand and into the back of the boat. In that position, there was nothing I could do to stop it, so I just sat still and let the skirt drain into the cockpit. Anything that wasn't wet from drips was wet now. Fortunately most of my stuff was in two drybags, but my wool army blanket was folded on the back seat (to keep it out of the bilge). So much for a warm, dry blanket.

I stowed my camera and broke out a small flashlight and my grandmother's big 6-volt "torch." The torch was tethered to the inside of the cockpit, so I pulled it up through the spray skirt tunnel under my PFD, in order to leave it tethered inside. That later proved to be a potentially serious blunder. However, for now I just paddled along the southwest and west sides of the island, enjoying the relative calm, with only small waves gently rocking the kayak. Occasionally I played my torch on the shoreline, revealing narrow, sandy beaches littered with driftwood and other flotsam. The water was shallow and the bottom flat: by stroking a little more deeply than usual, I could feel the bottom with my paddle.

The difference between the windward and leeward aspects of the island was striking. The trip out to the north of the island and down the east side had been over two hours of constantly battling waves and wind, with spray (and sometimes waves) splashing over the kayak, and the thunder of the water against the rocky shore. Particularly while paddling down the east side, there was isolation and darkness, broken only by the little lights on distant channel markers, and the occasional passage of sea-going vessels down the ship channel. Here to the west of the island, there was calm water, easy, relaxed paddling, and lighted homes and piers all along the western shore of the Bay, just a few miles off. A brightly lighted dredge was working a couple of miles to the southwest. A crewboat droned out from Dog River to the dredge and later droned back north to the river. Farther along the island shore, there were wooden structures and dredging equipment, big steel drums, a beached rusty barge, and stacks of huge pipe sections.

As I paddled slowly northward, a bright searchlight became visible to my right, shining over the inland portion of the island. It appeared to be located just above the trees, toward the far northeast side of the island. Since I knew of no structures or habitation over there, it seemed a bit spooky. However, it was probably just a light on the shrimp boat that had been anchored up that way.

By now, without the adrenaline and endorphins from fighting wind and waves, I was becoming acutely aware that I was tired, and that my clothes were wet (along with almost everything else in the kayak). I could put ashore, build a fire, and camp for the night, but there was no likelihood of being able to dry my blanket or my clothing. Besides that, I was supposed to be at work the next morning. I decided to forgo camping and paddle the 2 or 3 miles back to my put-in.

As I passed out of the sheltering effect of the island, the wind and waves from the east became a factor again. Although this time I was not having to crash through them head-on, they were continually turning the kayak from the northwesterly course I was trying to steer, onto a northerly heading which was not taking me toward my destination. On top of that, as each swell passed under the kayak and lifted the bow, the forward momentum of the kayak seemed to dissipate more than was compensated for by the brief surfing provided by the face of the next swell. A few hundred yards from the mainland, as I swept hard to force the bow around to the northeast for the umpteenth time, I was again contemplating the complications of installing a rudder, when an idea occurred to me. I leaned the kayak over to the port side, away from the waves, and it immediately became much easier to keep on course. It was a little awkward paddling while maintaining a lean with just my weight shifted, since the Jocassee has no thighbraces or straps to aid in control. However, devising bracing will be a lot simpler than installing a rudder system.

A pier jutting out from the shore just this side of my put-in beach, had a large house on the seaward end, with two bright spotlights shining on the water. Passing nearby in the glare, nothing was visible except for a surrealistic circle of choppy, translucent green waves all around me, with the lights shining through them and off the bottom. It was an uncomfortably strange place to be, made more so by the knowledge that in the darkness just outside that circle of light there were patches of partially submerged stubs and pilings from old piers destroyed in past storms. I figured that being deposited on top of a piling by a wave would at least capsize the kayak, and probably damage it (and maybe me too). As soon as I passed out of the spotlights' glare, I shone my light ahead looking for the pilings. They were farther off than I had feared.

I hove to a few yards from the beach to pop my spray skirt preparatory to landing. That's when I realized that my torch tether running up under my PFD and down the spray skirt tunnel had the effect of tethering me in the cockpit. I was forced to put down my paddle and struggle with forcing the torch back down through the spray skirt and then untangling myself from the tether line. As I did so, a succession of waves splashed over the side of the kayak and completed the job of soaking my clothes and the inside of the kayak. They also moved the kayak to within about two feet of some large rocks alongside the beach. I pushed out from the rocks, paddled out a few yards, and backed the kayak down onto the beach. Getting out and tugging the bow up on shore, I discovered that I wasn't going to drag it very far out of the water, because there were several gallons of water sloshing about in the stern, making it quite heavy. Only after hurriedly unloading all my gear and dumping some of the water out was I able to get the kayak fully ashore and begin loading the truck. By then I was quite tired and getting cold from thoroughly soaked clothing.

Obviously, sea kayaking alone at night is not generally a good idea. However, although it was exciting at times, this trip was not without safety margins. The Jocassee is wide and very stable, and the waves were not too high for safety. Except for the crossing between the mainland and the island, this whole trip was completed within a few yards of shore, and out of traffic lanes. I had two PFDs, a spare paddle, food, water, matches, flares, lights, a dry towel and jacket, and a cellular telephone. Had conditions gotten too rough at any point, I could have landed on the island and been safe.