We had near prefect wind conditions today, about 15 knots almost directly behind us with small predictable waves you could surf a bit. We made the most of it, put up our flat earth sails and covered 31 miles in 8 hours paddling. The sun even came out towards the end of the day. We’d like a conveyor belt like that again please!

We had fairly late launch after a fun and busy one and a half days in King Cove. Some of the local kids tried out our kayaks and it was great to see their smiles at being on the water. Time goes so quickly when we are in communities. The King Cove Corporation kindly put us up at the Fleets Inn motel and Della Trumble and her niece Jada showed us around the town of 900 permanently residents and 600 employees of the Peter Pan seafood cannery. We had a good feed in their mess Hall and in the local Chinese restaurant. A tour of the cannery was really interesting. Whole salmon come shooting in on a conveyor belt and not too many minutes later go shooting out in cans. In between, different people have specified roles, starting with picking out by-catch, to slimers who take out any innards that the mechanised chopper misses, people who make sure the cans are full enough, to fork lift drivers who take the crates of cooked cans from the oven. 220 full cans are produced from one line every
minute and they have 6 lines they can operate at once. If you have a tin of salmon in your larder check the number on the top. If it starts with 36 then it was caught and canned in King cove.

While we were in King cove a young bear was shot in someone’s yard. He dug his way into the yard where the dog, and probably some dog food was. It was sad to see the dead bear and also humbling to think we could get unlucky and come across an aggressive bear. We always hear mixed opinions about bears. Some people say we’ll barely see them and they’ll run away if they see or hear us. Others are more worried about us in bear country. I guess I took solace in the fact that there are lots of plump salmon around at the moment so bears should be full and content. The bear trying to get into sometimes yard worried me as it didn’t fit with my feel good theory. I was more relieved when someone pointed out the dog food in the yard. It was probably the smell of this that attracted the bear rather than the dog. We will continue to cook away from the tent and not have food in the tent. Tonight we are on an offshore island where there are no bears and we’ll continue to do this where possi ble.

We’re both quite tired from not quite enough sleep in King cove so time for some shut eye!