Blake Island Marine State Park

Blake Island Marine State Park main campground area.
Image taken from the jetty on the northeast corner of the island.

Blake Island is a very popular place in Puget Sound; however, you can only get here by boat. If you don't have your own boat you can get here on an Argosy boat. In the summer they have a boat that comes over and drops off people from the downtown Seattle waterfront for dinner and a show at Tilicum Village. Tilicum Village is the building on the right of the above image. It goes from a nice quiet place to a busy place when the boat arrives. The good news is that they don't stay long. After the show they leave.

There are deer and raccoons on the island. The raccoons come out in the daytime and are not afraid to go on the docks and enter your boat if you leave it open. If you are at the marina, you should always close your boat up when you leave your boat.

This is the entrance to the marina. You enter between the two rows of pilings and then turn to port (right side of image). The first dock is for the Argosy boat and the park rangers boats. After that there are four dock fingers you can use. In 2015 the fate went up to 70 cents a foot. They have electricity now at the dock and it is extra.

There is camping here on the northeast corner, the northwest corner, and the south end of the island. Mooring buoys are around the camping areas. The west side is the best place if you do not want to stay in the marina. Ships pass along the east side of the island and it can be rather rolly there (A good place for a flopper stopper if you have one). On the south side there can be some current. Once when I was there looking for my spot to anchor I could not find the mooring buoys. When I looked down I found one. They were under water. The current was strong enough to pull then under water. The orange, blue, red, and white lines on the map are trails on the island.

This is where the blue trail intersects with the trail that runs along the north side of the island. This is pretty much what the center of the island looks like. The trails are well maintained and easy to walk on.

This is the camp ground on the west side of the island. The image was taken where the trail comes out on the beach looking north.

This is from the same spot as the image above, but looking south. The boat is on one of the mooring bouys.