Discovering Marine life on the Pacific West Coast

 It took a few months to find the time to put the clips together, but there's finally a video product from a fantastic week that I, Kate and the kids had at the end of August 2022. 

Imagine spending a week on a charter boat: food taken care of, books to read, games to play, steaming mugs of coffee and tea on-demand all day long, conversation with family and friends... oh, and stunning nature out every window and up-close encounters with a huge variety of marine wildlife. 

We were SO lucky as a family to be able to do this. It was a wonderful family experience, created through the relationships and support of my mother-in-law and her partner and their circle of friends who welcomed our family of four into their circle for the week to take part in this excursion. 

As a Kamloops boy, you can imagine that I didn't grow up seeing much in the way of coastal wildlife. Black bears in the yard, eating from our fruit trees, sure. Coyotes, yipping all night just beyond the trees, absolutely. But Orcas slicing open glassy Pacific waters with their dorsal fins and Sea Lions bellowing incessantly as they flop around on rocky outcroppings... not so much. 

Despite living on the coast for 22 of the last 24 years, until this trip, I had pretty much never seen an orca in the wild. Two summers ago I got a distant fleeting glimpse of an Orca from a ferry deck as I crossed from Vancouver Island to the mainland, but that has been it. For decades worth of ferry crossings, and the occasional low-level float plane trip... never a sighting. 

That all changed during our summer adventure of 2022. We saw Humpbacks every day. We saw Orcas, over and over again. Dolphins, porpoise, a minke whale. Sea otters, seals, sea lions, mighty salmon leaping from the water, and birds galore. With the opportunity to get out in a zodiac and into kayaks on a daily basis, we also got up close and personal with a rich diversity of invertebrate life, which exists in abundance in the nutrient-rich cold waters of the pacific. In the Johnston Straight and Broughton Archipelago off Northern Vancouver Island, the tides flush in and out of small inlets, broken islands and narrows, refreshing food sources for a huge variety of sea stars, anemones, urchins and more. 

We also had a naturalist on board (Danny, whom you will meet in the video below) who knew...basically everything about birds, and we were treated to a wealth of sightings and information about an incredible diversity of winged friends. But one very basic fact for you... did you know there's no gull actually called a seagull? We just call these gulls seagulls because they happen to live around the water. But in fact... Glaucous-wing gull... California gull... Mew gull...these are the birds we tend to see around here that we lump in together as being the 'seagull'. we're now a family that is totally 'Woke' about gulls. spread the word, everybody. 

Honestly, I could go on about the birds, as well as all the other amazing creatures we got up close and personal with, but I'll just leave it to a few images below, as well as the video itself.

As for the weather, don't be fooled by recollections of a record-warm summer across most of our region. Here in the fog zone, most days were sunless and cool. Toques and warm coats were the order for most days! The sun did make occasional appearances, and we took advantage of the heat when it showed up, lounging on the bow deck and--in the case of a few brave passengers--even going for a swim in the chilly waters off norther vancouver island. 

We only saw the stars once, which made an appearance on our final night aboard. No photos as night photography aboard a boat is...well... kind of impossible since the boat bobs and moves around, but the sight of the Milky Way arching from one horizon, over our heads and down toward the other side, and all the billions of other stars to see in a sky that has no man-made lights to block the view... it was... wow. Pretty awesome to go "off grid" for a week to be able to see that. 

Thanks to the wonderful crew aboard the Oceanlight Adventures boat, Afterglow, for an unforgettable week!