Chapter 1 – The Blue and the Gray
Indeed, few experiences in life are finer than unzipping the door of your tent, deep in some remote wilderness, to reveal the weather and circumstances that will accompany your day’s explorations.
I crawl out of my tent amid the ankles of Sitka trees reaching hundreds of feet into the British Columbian sky. From the terrace on which I’m camped I look out through the vertical windows between the Sitkas onto a gray Pacific Ocean so smooth it looks like it’s been pulled tight and tucked in with hospital corners. The sky is smoked-glass gray and the morning fog winds through the shoulders of the tall, tall Sitkas like a feather boa.
I walk down to the main camp which is situated at beach level just twenty feet above the high-tide mark, and into the camp kitchen where I find our guides — Caroline and Scott — cooking breakfast, who cheerily wish me a good morning. I wish them one in return while I make myself a mug of hot chocolate.
I find two more of my fellow kayakers, Oliver and Birgit, a little farther down the gravel beach sitting on a large driftwood log. Oliver is facing out to sea, Birgit is turned the other way facing the sun. Birgit holds her hands warmly around a cup of coffee and looks very content. Isaac Beam, another kayaker in our group, stands at the edge of the water hitting rocks into the sea with a stick.
I walk over to them, bidding them all a good morning, and sit on the log next to Oliver and join him in his sea gazing meditations. Isaac tosses another rock into the air and bats it out into the sea.
A few minutes later Scott calls out from behind his grill — in a voice strong enough to be heard through the camp — that breakfast is ready. “Come and get it!”
I am one of nine clients and two guides who have embarked on a six-day sea kayaking voyage. We left yesterday from Telegraph Cove, located on the north side of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and made our way east hugging the island’s northern coastline. Today we’ll explore Johnstone Strait and tomorrow we’ll cross it and enter a group of islands known as the Broughton Archipelago where we’ll spend the rest of the week exploring the islands and sea channels.
We eat breakfast as a group, enquiring between bites how everyone slept and passed the night. After eating breakfast, we wash the dishes, then, working in teams of two we carry the kayaks from their night berth above the high-tide mark down to the water’s edge where we place them in the sea with their sterns resting on the beach. When all kayaks and kayakers are present, our guides lead us through a few stretches to work out the kinks and sore spots left in our muscles from yesterday’s exertions.
While we’re stretching, Caroline tells us the day’s itinerary. “We’re going to head east along the shore of Vancouver Island. We’re going to look for wildlife, and all things beautiful, interesting and curious both on sea and on land. And keep your eyes open for Orcas; there’s a good chance we’ll see some today. Then, sometime this afternoon we’ll come back to camp.”
Caroline finishes with one of my favorite phrases: “Are you ready to go exploring?”
Always (knock on wood)!
We pull our kayaks onto the water and, employing some black belt yoga moves, lower ourselves into the cockpits of our kayaks, and snap our sprayskirts over the cockpit. Scott and Caroline lead the way, and the rest of us fall in behind them like ducklings.
We transport all our camp gear, and six days worth of food and water, inside our kayaks from camp to camp. But today, since we’re returning to the same camp, we can leave all of it behind, with the exception of today’s lunch and some water. So now, with the majority of the gear left behind, our kayaks are noticeably lighter, and they glide across the smooth surface of the sea like an egg on buttered Teflon.
The air is delightfully cool. The pine- and spruce-covered mountains are still smoldering in fog. A few cannon-puff clouds dot the blue sky over the sea.
For the first half hour of our journey we hug the shore of Vancouver Island as we make our way east. Within a few minutes our group has spread out, our individual wakes spread and follow us like Saran Wrap bridal trains.
The northern end of Vancouver Island rises sharply out of the water — at least the stretch we’re exploring today — and multi-story spruce trees grow right down to the water’s edge. There are very few beaches here, but up ahead on a skinny dash of gravel beach Scott spots a black bear feeding. He quietly signals this to the rest of us. We stop paddling and let our kayaks drift in closer, silently. The bear never looks up. We watch it turn over rocks and logs and eat things it finds beneath them. We watch it for several minutes then, our curiosity sated, we paddle silently forward, leaving it to continue its breakfast undisturbed.
We travel a little farther and we start seeing little fish, about the size of dollar bills, jumping out of the water, like bars of soap squirting from a bather’s hand. As we watch, the jumping fish grow more numerous. Our guide Scott tells us landlubbers that they are perch, and that some larger predator must be chasing them underwater. Occasionally, a salmon jumps out too. Mark and Nicole, traveling together in a double kayak, point out to us two bald eagles sitting on the dead limb of a tall tree right at the land’s edge. The eagles are watching the jumping perch and salmon with great interest, and while we watch, one of the eagles hops from its branch straight into a dive toward the jumping boil of fish. I hear Nicole draw in a sharp gasp in anticipation. The eagle nears the water, flattens out its trajectory, skims across the surface of the water and when it reaches the fish boil snatches at a fish. But misses.
Our entire group, which has been watching the unfolding drama, let’s out a disappointed “Aaahh!” in unison.
After hugging the shore of Vancouver Island for another half mile, Scott and Caroline guide us out farther into the channel of Johnstone Strait, which, they tell us, will increase our chances of seeing some Orcas.
A few minutes later, to my left, I hear a crisp, abrupt and quite startling, exhalation of air, which to my farm boy ears — in the split second before I turn my head to see what has made that sound — sounds exactly like the pasture bull clearing its nose just before it lowers its head and charges. I turn my head in time to see a rounded, black and white dorsal fin slide underwater. Orca!
Nope. Hold on. Relax homeslice!
Caroline tells us it’s only a Dall’s porpoise. Dall’s porpoises have black and white coloration similar to that of a killer whale but they’re much smaller. The size of a porpoise.
The porpoise surfaces again, about sixty feet ahead of us. This time its abrupt exhalation is followed by a deep, deep inhalation; and it submerges again. About thirty seconds and hundred feet farther on it surfaces again, with another sharp exhalation and this time an inhalation that would make a black hole jealous. When it dives its flukes appear and Scott explains to us that the appearance of the tail fin means its diving deep and will disappear underwater for a long time. We probably won’t see it again.
All I can think is, Oh wow! What an amazing creature! I can’t believe I was so blessed to just witness that!
Caroline tells us that we’re going to stop for lunch and steers us from the main corridor of Johnstone Strait toward Vancouver Island and paddles for a log-strewn beach.
As Caroline and Scott prepare lunch, the rest of us take off our spray skirts, and lay them across driftwood logs, or the hulls of our kayaks, to dry out. I am curious about the bear we saw earlier, the one turning over logs and rocks and eating what it found beneath them. So I wander a short distance away from the group and turn over a few logs and rocks to see what lies underneath. I don’t find much under the rocks, but almost every log I turn over, if I dig into its pulpy underside, I find a bazillion grubs (I don’t know what kind). This then, must be what the bear was eating.
I return back to the group when lunch is ready. Most of the group stands together, talking excitedly about the many amazing things we have seen this morning. A few minutes later Caroline, who is looking out at the strait, says, “I see something out there. It might be Orcas.”
We all turn to look where she is looking, and we see what she’s seeing: little water spouts, way out there: the exhalations of Orcas?
“Yup,” Caroline says, with the calm of someone who has seen this a hundred times. “That’s a pod of Orcas. Leave your lunches!” she shouts. “We’ll come back later! Let’s go!”
We jump into our spray skirts and run to our kayaks like scrambled F-16 pilots. Once we’re all in our kayaks Caroline and Scott lead the charge toward the spouting killer whales. The Orcas are far out in the center of the channel, about three hundred yards away, moving eastward. Caroline takes us on an intercepting course. We dig in our paddles and sprint toward them.
As we reach the pod Caroline stops, and we stop behind her, our breathing, after our long sprint, almost as deep and loud as the Orcas.
We reach the pod just as the last whales pass by. We continue to track the pod’s progress spout by spout as they swim away to the east.
But then, unexpectedly, we hear another whale spout behind us. We snap our heads in that direction in time to see a geyser of vapor drifting through the air and the ocean closing over a long, black dorsal fin. Then a little farther behind that another Orca breaches and spouts, then behind me and to my right I hear another. And then they’re spouting in front of me, to my left, to my right, behind me, and we realize we’re right in the center of a large pod or Orcas. It’s like standing in Yellowstone’s Geyser Basin during a go-off.
To my left another Orca surfaces and spouts less than forty feet away from me, and the vapor from its spouting creates a mini-rainbow as it catches the sunlight, and then it drifts over me. I just got sprinkled by an Orca rainbow! That’s pretty cool!
I am quite anxious that a whale will rise out of the dark depths and snatch me in its jaws and carry me down with it, or at the very least bump me with its back as it breaches. The whales no longer approach from our left, and we watch the pod travel farther and farther to the east until they are out of sight. The entire encounter with the whales lasts less than three minutes.
After the last Orca passes out of sight, Scott and Caroline lead us back to the beach where we had abandoned our lunch. At first we’re still too stunned to talk, still processing the amazing moment, but a few minutes later, Burke breaks the silence. “One of the whale spouts drifted right over me! That’s the coolest thing that’s ever happened in my life!” And in a more reverent tone he adds “I think I just got baptized by a killer whale!”
Me too!
We finish our lunches, spend another hour exploring along the shoreline of Vancouver Island, then return back to camp. After securing our kayaks in a safe berth above the high tide mark, I climb the hillside where my tent is pitched on a narrow terrace beneath a tribe of Sitka Spruces as tall as Yggdrasil.
I spread out my spray skirt and damp clothes on some branches to dry in the day’s remaining sunlight. From the main camp below me I hear the dull “chud” of an axe chopping wood.
From my camp on the third tier of a soggy-needle hillside I have a window — framed by more of those beautiful Sitkas — that looks west-northwest across our beach — which is curved like the blade of an Ulu knife — and beyond that the wide, wide beautiful sea.
I see our guide Scott paddling his kayak about two hundred feet offshore trying to catch a salmon to accompany tonight’s dinner. From my perspective up on the bluff his sea kayak looks just like one of those old-timey compass needles.
Golden Pacific sunlight glances off the ocean waves which are arriving on the beach in peristaltic regularity. The sun is just an hour from setting and its low angle allows it to delineate all the marbling, whorls and runes written on the surface of the water like a chalk rubbing of an old tombstone.
It’s very beautiful to watch. But as amazing as it is to stand there, seventy feet up the side of an ancient, wild island, and watch the sun dance on the water, it is even more amazing when I turn around and see the marbling, whorls and runes of the sea — like Damascus steel — reflected in gold on the undersides of the Sitka’ branches.
I spread out my poncho across the ever-damp, spongy pine needles and lie down on my back and just watch the golden sun ripples playing on the undersides of the Sitka spruce, and breathe contentedly of British Columbia’s patented sea and evergreen air, mingled perfectly with the smoke of the campfire wafting up from the beach camp below.
Goosebumps the size of porcupine quills sprout on my arms and the back of my neck.
