The trio camped at Marchand Pt. near Hippa island last night after paddling down the coast another 25 nm at about a 4 nm/hr pace. Winds were light except for about the last hour when it was at their backs. Another wonderful day with 3 different groups of humpback whales and sea lions playing by swimming under their kayaks. Looks like weather allowing, they will back in QC City/Skidegate Saturday or Sunday. A couple of photos from earlier in the journey are included.
Despite the name of the location all is well. Sorry about the lack of information on the blog. I haven’t been able to update blog entries because during some server maintenance, the password was inadvertantly reset to an old one. Here’s an update on their progress and a couple of photos taken earlier in their journey. Note that Shawna is not getting enough exercise so she does Yoga while on shore.
Tuesday, July 10
Justine called and they are camped near Langara island 2-3 miles from the west coast and ready to head south down the coast tomorrow. Justine, Shawna and Leon are all in good spirits and greatly enjoying their trip. They did about 23 nm on Monday. They are seeing amazing amounts of wildlife and many, many birds while weaving through the kelp beds. Justine said she has never seen so many eagles. They have also seen 2 humpback and some gray whales. Today they ran into ‘a bit of a storm’ and decided not to head down the west coast in the strong SW winds. So today they are relaxing and washing clothes and bodies. Some fisherman took them in and served them tea in their ‘plush digs. They were amazed at the contrast between new and old with a Haida long house remains on the other side of the bay.
Wednesday, July 11
Justine called around 7 pm and all 3 are well. They paddled about 21 nm down the coast to Peril Bay today. She said the west coast is already quite different with the swells being much larger (maybe 3 meters). They are camped on a long beach (you can see it on the satellite photo) and it is a gorgeous misty kind of evening with enough sun to dry things out. They are greatly enjoying their surroundings.
Mike
So we’ve had 4 days on the water so far and have reached the town of Masset, 90 nautical miles from Skidegate where we started! This is the last town we’ll pass on Graham Island, from here on there are no roads or settlements and we’re heading towards the exposed West coast. So we made the most of a hot meal cooked by someone else tonight ( no offence to Leon, who has done a great job of keeping our bellies full of fuel every other night!). It was interesting to walk through Old Masset, the Haida village tonight. There are loads of amazing totem poles and we saw dozens of bald eagles and ravens flying incredibly close overhead. The locals were feeding the birds their fish scraps so the birds were swooping down low to fight over them.
The coastline so far has been mainly a low lying beach. We’d been expecting this section to be quite monotonous but were pleased to find that it constantly changed from black pebbles to white sand to huge boulders, with dunes, cliffs or dense forest behind it. Always there are hundreds of huge logs strewn on the top of the beach. Fortunately we haven’t had the sort of weather that put them there as it was pretty calm for the first 3 days, allowing us to make some good distance. yesterday we rounded “Rose Spit’, an amazing 3km long curving sand spit that marks the NE tip of Graham island into what the locals call Long Nose. We basically paddled 6km or more to end up within 100metres of where we started (!) but we couldn’t bring ourselve to portage it!!
We saw our first whale today – a playful Grey Whale who was doing some strange but impressive maneovers with it’s fin on the water. He came within 15 metres of us at one point which was incredile ( and a little scary when you have an expensive camera in your hands!). Just after seeing the whale, and passing ‘Tow Head’, a basalt mound that pokes out of the flat earth from nowhere, the wind picked up and we ended up battling into about 15knots of wind for most of the day… hopefully not the sign of things to come!
Overall we’ve having an amazing time in a beautiful country. Can’t wait for the rest of it!!
Justine called and all is well. They’ve paddled for a couple of days (about 40 nm) and could be in Masset as soon as tomorrow. They are enjoying themselves and happy to be on the water. The weather has been good and they are seeing lots of wildlife although no whales yet. And they are seeing thousands of driftwood logs. Getting Justine’s batteries and cameras to her has been a challenge for myself and John Gamba as the import rules have changed recently in Canada but I’m hoping the gear and Justine will connect up. ——– Mike