Camp II - Thistleton - Found

Camp II on Thistleton Island has eluded detection for over 13 years but was “found” in July 2018 by Glenn Lewis.  It’s probable that Glenn was the first visitor the camp had seen since Bill pulled down the tarp and moved three kilometers southeast to establish Camp III.  I don’t know when that move occurred but it was prior to 2003 as Camp III was fully in play that year.

Armed with Bill’s charts Keith Webb searched Thistleton in 2005.  No dice.  Glenn had been there a few times in past years, once with the specific intent of finding the camp.  Both Keith and Glenn struck out.  The nice beach at the northeastern end of the narrow passageway seemed to call their names as well as those of any other visitors the island entertained.  It was the obvious location with a friendly beach and was surely where the camp had existed but no camp was found. 

Glenn’s study of Bill’s charts overlaid with his personal coastal experiences, specific knowledge of some camp locations, descriptions of Bill’s fastidious detail including Colin Lake’s account of his eye for detail in “Breakfast with Kayak Bill” (https://3meterswell.blogspot.com/2017/11/breakfast-with-kayak-bill-by-colin-lake_24.html)  convinced him to take a closer look at where Bill marked his camps on his normally low-tech charts.  Bill had carefully marked the camp’s location on a section of shoreline that Glenn knew to be rocky and inhospitable and was ~120 meters from a friendly place to land so that’s where he would look. 

In July Glenn landed on Thistleton and started searching the shoreline fronted by the rocky beach. 

In the exact spot that Bill had marked the camp he pushed through the overgrown boughs and fallen debris and stepped into Camp II. 

It was rough, overgrown and didn’t reflect some of the sophistication in the basic elements that some other earlier camps exhibit. 

That makes me think that he didn’t view this camp as anything more than a secondary site until something better could be found. 

Camp I and Camp III were both cozier, more developed sites with friendly beaches used while he pushed out towards more isolated locations.  Camp II was his first camp on the outside of Aristazabal and I think it was simply a forward post that he was happy to leave behind.  

Continued..........