Tuesday August 4th
Our marine day started at Ukee’s aquarium. What looked from the outside like a beachside shack turned out to be a fab exhibit: all local sea fauna caught, held for a couple of months and released back into the sea. The student guides were tremendously knowledgeable and several of the tanks were open-topped to enable us to pick up the animals. These ranged from starfish (sea stars) of all sizes and colours to anemones, sea cucumbers, transparent moon jellyfish, octopus and many types of camoflagued fish.
After this, we drove over to Tofino to Jamie’s Whaling Station for our final adventure trip of the holiday, described in the publicity as not suitable for pregnant women, those with back problems or… the incontinent! This involved us being dressed in huge padded suits on the lines of the Apollo mission and trooping down to a waiting Zodiac. This took us circling out of the harbor and then bouncing across the swell at high speed – better and wetter than any funfair ride. Porpoise swam bedside us and sea birds skimmed the water. In Cow Bay we spotted a grey whale: they spout 3 or 4 times, each time arching and swimming back down, before a final plunge to the sea bed, then re-surface 5 minutes later. After watching this for 15 minutes, we carried on further down the coast where we saw a female humpback and her calf cresting out of the water in sequence. On our return to Tofino after our 3 hour trip we passed half a dozen huge yellowish sea-lions basking on rocks. All in all a great way to spend our final day.
To those of you who’ve read, this is probably the final entry (barring a really exciting journey home!), so thanks for bearing/baring (?) with me on this first foray into the blogosphere. Don’t worry, I’ll be boring you all with the full unedited photo run in due course!
Kate
