Day 9 - If The Holiday Ended Here...

After a fairly grim but not inedible breakfast at Port McNeill, we checked out of our cheesily-named Haidaway hotel and into a drizzly, depressing morning. By the way, if I was rough on Port McNeill yesterday, it's only because it's there to be rough to. The town has no pretentions, it's a place to go to if you're getting a ferry somewhere else. I will say that the air was sparklingly clean and refreshing, and our hotel, though wanting from the outside, was perfectly fine on the inside, with a fantastic room, and staff who were friendly and helpful to an individual. I would stay there again. Just not for a weekend.

Our first port of call was that world famous burl. "You'd think something that size would just leap out at... oh my gosh." It's enormous. It must be 13 feet tall.

Photo op complete, we drove on through the rain to Telegraph Cove.

It wasn't far, and by the time we got there the rain had stopped, though there was still low cloud over the hillsides. I thought that Telegraph Cove might be a little town, but it's not, it really is a cove, and the only buildings there are a few holiday cottages and those housing the few on-season businesses that operate here. Off-season, Telegraph Cove has a population of 4.

We checked in at Stubbs Island Whale Watching Tours to make sure they were expecting us and to pay for our tickets, then had a coffee in the only coffee shop (there's a restaurant too, but we didn't go in that). The recommendation was for layers of clothing to keep warm, so we went back to F and got a couple of extra tops to put over what we were already wearing, and by the time we got back the morning whale watching boat was arriving. Everyone on it looked frozen. As they disembarked, the people waiting for the afternoon session (ours) were asking the same question; "did you see any killer whales? Did you?"

Word came back that no killer whales had been seen. A humpback, but no killers. People looked disappointed. I was thinking, "a humpback? You've seen a HUMPBACK WHALE? And you're disappointed?"

After a short wait, the captain of our boat introduced himself, gave us a short safety talk, then got us onboard. We chugged slowly out of Telegraph Cove, then out into Johnstone Strait. Straight away there was talk of a humpback, and sure enough, after only a few minutes we could see the plume of water that was the whale's blow. Christie, our resident naturalist, told us how we could expect to see between 4 and 7 blows, then the whale would dive. That's exactly what happened; four, five, six blows, then a roll of the back, an almost contemptuous flick of the tail, and the whale was gone for anywhere between 5 and 10 minutes. And no one knew where it would come back up; everyone was scanning all around the boat looking for that tell-tale blow.

I should point out here that whale-watching is done in a sensitive manner by these professional companies. It's not a case of racing to the last reported sighting, then following the whale until it's exhausted. No whale is followed for more than 30 minutes, the boat is never put in front of the whale, always a safe distance to one side (safe for the whale, that is), and engines are turned off so as not to disturb it.

We followed the humpack for a while, then reports were coming in of a family of killer whales. Apparently these are familiar visitors to Telegraph Cove, and regularly return when the salmon return. The captain turned the boat around to give the humpback some respite, and chugged very slowly over to where the killer whales had been sighted. Through binoculars I could make out dorsal fins, three of them, and this tallied with what Christie the naturalist was telling us we should expect; part of a greater family, two adult males and the "aunt" who had adopted them after their mother died.

Our boat putted slowly closer, not wishing to alarm the whales, not wishing to disturb them from what they were doing (which appeared to be hunting salmon). I had thought, prior to our holiday, that the strait would be awash with Orcas, rolling and jumping out of the sea to order. It's not like that. The one I saw throwing itself out of the water on our trip over from the mainland was an exception. You rarely see more than a blow and a dorsal fin, perhaps with a hint of back or tail. It was almost - almost - disappointing, until the whales changed direction slightly, moving closer to the boat as a trio, drawing gasps and cries and even the odd "r-sum!" from the people on board. It was a really special time, and I know it was everything Sandra had wanted out of the trip, her face was a picture.

Then, another humpback had been spotted, so we left the family of killer whales at last, and tracked the second humpback over a choppier sea, bouncing and rocking in the waves, until the captain decided enough rough stuff was enough. He took us in to some calmer water, round some of the archipelago that dots the Strait, and we saw Stellar Sea Lions, and a bald eagle, and some bull kelp, which can grow as much as 16 cms a day in warm weather, and is kept afloat by spheres of weed filled with enough carbon dioxide to kill a chicken (not sure who tested that last fact out - must have been an interesting task).

If it hadn't been for the wildlife, the scenery would have been enough; island after island, pine-covered of course, rolling mountains in the distance in either direction... I felt I could see for a hundred miles.

Eventually the trip was over, and the captain brought us in, salt-stained, sun-burned, wind-blasted, to the Cove we had left four hours earlier. Tired but happy, we made our way back to F, and typed the address of our next hotel into the sat nav. It had been a good relationship, the love-triangle between ourselves, F, and the sat nav, but now it was coming to an end.

The drive to Port Hardy was a short one. Uneventful? Hardly. Rounding a long, sweeping right-hand bend we came upon a smallish black bear eating grass by the roadside. It seemed almost small-fry after seeing two humpbacks and a family of killer whales, but it wasn't at all, and I looped back for Sandra to get some pictures of it.

We checked into our hotel, dropped our baggage off, then took F to Port Hardy airport where we dumped him unceremoniously because there was no one at the National Car Rental desk. In fact there seemed to be no one anywhere. The only person I actually saw was a member of the ground crew in a hangar. I phoned for a taxi ("Name?" "Murphy." "Aren't you the guy who invented that law?" "No, that was my dad."), we got back to the hotel, and had a fantastic meal of duck breast and spatzl in the restaurant next door.

If the holiday ended here, neither of us would be disappointed, it's been absolutely fantastic so far. But we're not even half-way through!

Tomorrow we catch the ferry north to Prince Rupert. Early start - need to check in at 5:30am, ugh.