Kayaking in the Broken Group Islands, 2009

Climbing into your sleeping bag after a long day’s paddle, your body’s fatigued, your mind’s relaxed and sleep comes easily. My wife Jan and I had just spent a week kayaking the Broken Islands on the west coast of Vancouver Island and for our last night, we’d pitched our tent on a beautiful beach on Gibraltar Island.   It was a perfect night for sleeping: the air was still, the water calm, not a sound could be heard.

Until …

Just before dawn, still deep asleep, we were gradually nudged into consciousness by a gentle sound -- a “chuffff”, then another “chuffff”, then another.  Jan whispered “do you hear that?”  We held our breaths waiting to hear it again.  Then, another chuffff and we both exclaimed, in unison, “a whale!”  We jumped out of our bags and stumbled down to the water’s edge. The sun hadn’t risen yet, but the sky had been painted with a beautiful pre-dawn glow and the trees across the bay with an inky black.  When we heard the next chufff, it was just light enough to make out the unmistakable profile and spout of a majestic humpback whale.

The whale continued its pattern of a few breaths followed by a long time underwater while it dove deep for food, and we sat and watched as it gradually worked its way further and further down the channel until finally it was out of sight.  The sun was now well above the horizon and we basked in its warmth and relished the memories of a fantastic trip on west coast capped off with this intimate encounter with a humpback.

Our adventure began with a three hour sail down the inlet from Port Alberni aboard the MV Frances Barkley.  It deposited us, our kayak and gear on a dock at Sechart, just outside the Broken Island Group of the Pacific Rim National Park.  The Broken Group is one of three units of the Pacific Rim National Park.  It sits midway between the West Coast Trail unit to the south and the Long Beach Unit, located between Tofino and Ucluelet, to the north.

At the dock, we were greeted by a park ranger who briefed us on how to have a safe and enjoyable experience and commented that “there are so many whales this summer that I’ll give you your money back if you don’t see one”.    He was right.  Within an hour  of leaving the dock, we saw our first humpback spouting in the distance! And we were to see whales, seals and sea lions, almost every day.

One encounter was a little too close for comfort.  We had already pitched camp for the night and saw a whale heading toward us down a long channel.  We decided to hop in our kayak to get a better look.  After a short paddle, we stopped and waited.  It had been down a very long time and finally broke water perhaps a hundred metres to our left.  What a great view.  We remained motionless, scanning the water for it to break through again.   This time it surfaced directly in front of us, a few short metres away.  Jan whooped and I gulped, but still managed to snap a picture.  It was so close that we noticed that, where it had just surfaced, the water went dead calm – it had left a distinct “footprint” in the choppy water.  Slowly we drifted towards the footprint but fortunately, we saw it surface again far off to our right.  We had survived our close encounter.

The other close encounters we had were with fellow paddlers and what a great bunch of people we met.   On our last night, a real international group gathered round a communal campfire on the beach:  a young couple from France who had made this one of their stops on a round the world adventure, a family of three from the US, a couple from England who had a life-long fascination with the Canadian wilderness - the man’s daily dip in these frigid waters was part of his Canadian experience, a German couple celebrating their tenth year kayaking these waters and four of us from Canada.  Under the beautiful starry skies, we swapped stories, ate marshmallows and shared an unforgettable, distinctly west coast experience.

It was a night and a trip that we’ll cherish forever.  This part of BC is teeming with life in all its beauty.   And still sometimes as I drift off to sleep I can almost hear that far off chuffff of a gentle giant.   It’s a wonderful sound and if you’re ever going to be woken up from a deep sleep, I can’t imagine a better sound or a better place to hear it than on a beach, on an island on the west coast of BC.