Broken Group Islands Nature Cruise

Sometimes it's just easier to go backwards, so after telling you all about Vancouver, the city, at the end of our vacation, here's the wildlife/nature cruise we took our last full day on Vancouver Island. It was 5.5 glorious hours on Toddy and Al's home, their 53' Archipelago yacht, 14 of us passengers as their guests!

Even though we left at 10a, it was still barely daylight. So in the entire first half of the photo album, it's hazy and without sun. No problem for me (though chilly) because I love that kind of mood. This fishing boat (above) was heading out for its catch-of-the-day (or was it already coming back in?).

Speaking of chilly, our hosts came prepared, offering nice, soft and thin-enough gloves to still operate the camera. I did find out, however, that it was cold enough to disable certain of my camera functions (namely the zoom). So I had to bundle up the camera from time to time.

Besides the myriad seals/sea lions (you'll get your fill in the album!), we did see several eagles but not close enough to get good shots. You can see they're eagles but that's the closest we got for my 12x zoom. We saw several other birds, for which we were told their names. I know I got many cormorants. But the other birds are nameless for me right now. We saw several gray whales and even saw their tails pop out but I could never get the camera on them fast enough. There's only one pic showing only the hump of one whale (see if you can spot it because I forgot to name it in the album). These whales have been living on Earth for only the past 30 million years, that's all!

As the sun came out, the colors were more vivid, as you see. You can also tell why these are called the Broken Group Islands of Barkley Sound. I actually was just as fascinated with them as the wildlife! Just spectacular in all their different shapes and sizes. It looked like sea-lion colonies were claiming their own little islands.

BTW, those sea lions preen and act coy with the best of them! Al told us that they will cock their snouts up in the air like they could care less if anyone is watching them, but then they'll tilt their heads and look to see if anyone IS watching. I actually captured that several times. So cute.

What a memory! And it started and stopped so close to where we stayed in Ucluelet Harbor, just a stone's throw from our condo. We'd do it again in the blink of an eye.

[While the cat is gone (in fact, she's flying to Basel from Amsterdam as we speak), the mouse has played :). But she'll be back here in Hannover by late afternoon tomorrow!]