SOLO CANOE PASSAGE WITH TRACES OF SNOW

  

Errett M. Graham (1877-1974)
Land surveyor and County Engineer
paddling his canvas Old Town Canoe.
Circumnavigating Shaw Island,
San Juan Archipelago
on his 94th birthday. 
Photograph in the calm of June
by Babs Cameron,
from the archives of the 
Saltwater People Historical Society©


Passed on to the Friday Harbor Journal was this quote by Emmett Watson previously published by the Seattle-P-I, in 1970:

        "Sometime quite soon residents of San Juan County will say goodbye to Mr. Errett M. Graham, the county engineer. What makes this goodbye rather special is the fact that Mr. Graham, now 92, just retired in May. He always paddled his own canoe into Friday Harbor for the meetings of the Board of County Commissioners–ignoring the ferries. He celebrated his 90th birthday by paddling his canoe around Lopez Island. . ."

And from the handwritten daily diary of the canoe master, Mr. Errett Graham are these words.

20 February 1951:

"Tough Trip

If I had had even a premonition of the difficulties I was fated to encounter on my return trip today, I would either have stayed over or made a very early start. I landed at a homestead just short of Limestone Pt., walked over to the point, and saw I couldn't possibly buck the tide there. The man there said that the tide split at Limestone Pt. and that once around it, I should have a favoring tide. I found a road over which I could portage and got in the water again just south of the white limestone point. I made a few hundred feet along a nice gravel beach to a rocky and forbidding projecting point at its southeasterly end. Attempting to get around this I got in some very rough water shipped several quarts and made absolutely no advance, I'm fact, I lost ground and had to land on a coarse rock beach. I took a long walk down the beach to give the tide or wind time to change and had visions of having to spend the night there. When the whitecaps quieted a bit I refloated the canoe and made another attempt, succeeding this time and heading straight for Brown Island to make the channel crossing before the tide became adverse again. Water was quite rough–but nothing like it was at Limestone Point. Evidently, the tide did not split at that Point as I had been told; passed east of Yellow Island and touched shore in Squaw Bay tired and chilled. There were traces of snow on Lopez. A hot supper and a bath, the house warmed up. O.K., now."

1951 Diary of Errett M. Graham.
Archived in the Shaw Island Historical Museum