The bugs were out of control again this morning. I packed up and got on the water as quickly as possible but continued to scratch for about an hour of being on the water. When I finally made it out of the bay and into open water I checked my tracker to see how far I had gone to get an idea of what the day would look like. I was cruising at 4 mph average. I haven’t hit this pace for quite some time. I figured I would have an easy day. After a while I felt like I was slowing down. I couldn’t figure out why until I looked down. I was in pretty shallow water even though I was a few miles off shore. I don’t need much water to stay a float unrestricted but if I don’t have over about a foot or two then it slows me down tremendously. I could have gone further out but that would have put me way off shore and the effort to get there wasn’t worth it. Mentally it was a struggle and I felt like I would never make it. When I saw a chain of islands I knew after that it was about 3 miles to the spillway where I thought I would camp. I stopped on one of the islands to stretch and check my maps to know exactly where I was going. I realized that it had suggested to camp on one of the islands. The island they suggested was 2 over closer to the mainland. It was 3/4 a mile to get there. I debated paddling it but found a decent spot to camp on this island under some trees and was lined up for tomorrow to paddle directly across to the break in the spillway. So instead of having to paddle back tomorrow I just made camp. While I was getting a fire going I noticed a lizard darting around. At one point he was in the rock fire place while I had a fire going. I kept hearing a noise like ruffling leaves while I sat there and figured it was another lizard. I couldn’t ever see it when I would turn on my light. I finally caught it in my head lamp near my food bag. But it wasn’t a lizard. It was a mouse! It wasn’t big enough for me to consider it a rat. He ran off and I was worried that there might be more and they were hungry enough to chew through my tent at night to get my food. It was kind of overcast but being close to the water I figured I would leave the rain fly off my tent for a good breeze. While I was laying in bed about to fall asleep I checked the weather for tomorrow. Rain was on its way. I’m glad I checked the weather instead of waking up to being soaked and trying to get my rain fly on after it was too late. It was calling for rain from about midnight on. 100% most of the day tomorrow mostly in the morning. I checked the radar and it didn’t look good. I realized that I might be stuck on this island all day tomorrow and maybe even longer. I put my rainfly on and staked it down the best I could in preparation of a storm. I fell asleep to the sound of the waves crashing on the shore and the rain pounding my tent hoping that the storm would pass and I could get off the island tomorrow.