What a dreadful night. I think I was so worried about the alarm not going off in the morning that I woke up every half hour. The alarm was required because someone wanted to go bear watching and that meant getting on board a boat that was leaving Tofino harbour at 6:30am, which meant alarms set for 5:30am.
There was no need to worry about the alarm, it went off as required and within moments I’d woken Tracy and the boys and we were dressed in our warm layers. We got to Jaime’s Whale Tours just after 6am, grabbed a coffee, took a quick photo of an eagle in a tree and boarded the boat. Tracy and the boys went, sensibly, and sat in the warm inside. I sat outside in the cold fog (because I’d had a lot of garlic in my dinner last night and Tracy wasn’t keen on sitting anywhere near me!), with a blanket and a camera poised just in case something appeared. All sorts of things probably did appear but the fog was so thick we wouldn’t have seen them anyway!
After a while the engine noise slowed, my finger twitched on the camera but there was no need, we were just passing some mud flats that had some important thing about them but I couldn’t hear because I was sat right by the engines! Anyway, it wasn’t a bear so we kept going. Before long the engine slowed again, bears perhaps? Nope. Sea stars. Lots of them and they were impressive but I feel like I’ve seen enough of them after our morning on Alki Beach. I wanted bears!
Another few minutes and the engines slowed again. Third time lucky perhaps? Hell yeah! A bear! There on the beach, lifting rocks to find his (or her) breakfast was a black bear! My first real life wild bear, apart from the dead baby one we saw when we drove over the mountains in Yosemite but I don’t feel like that really counts, plus I didn’t stop to take a picture. I was taking pictures this time though and plenty of them. I had my best lens on the camera but I could have done with the boat being a bit closer so I could get a really nice photo!
After watching this bear eating its breakfast we were soon off to another beach and more bears! And this time there was a bonus bear, mother and baby. It was a this year baby and he was just running around following his mum before disappearing off into the woods. Apparently the most common cause of death for baby bears is nothing like evil wolves or other predators, it’s falling out of trees! They like climbing trees but it sounds like they’re not so good at getting down again.
As a couple more boats turned up we moved on to yet another beach. There were bears everywhere. Or at least there were another two anyway. We couldn’t get too close though and the pictures weren’t great. It was amazing seeing bears but I just wanted to get closer but not too close obviously. As we left this beach we went round the tip of an island and at the end of it was a bear. It was close, this was it. Or at least it was going to be until it walked behind a big rock. What was wrong with these bears? Didn’t they understand I’d come a long way to see them and I wanted a picture. Eventually he did come out from behind the rock and walked straight at us. He kept stopping to roll stones over looking for crabs and other goodies for breakfast. He obviously found something tasty under one rock, a crab I think, and as I watched him chewing through the camera lens I could actually hear him crunching through the shell – that’s how close we were! Harry and Toby were there snapping away on their cameras complaining that they couldn’t zoom in close enough but it didn’t stop them.
After a while, we set off again towards a small island where harbour seals hangout. You have to feel sorry for the seals. Firstly, whenever you go on a whale or bear watching cruise you always get to see seals but no-one is really interested. And secondly, in this particular instance, the seals were balancing on a small rock and then the wake from our boat came along a knocked them off. A couple managed to hold on but then another wave came and wiped them out too! Poor seals.
With the seals photographed it was time for us to head back to Tofino. There were no more bears but we did get to see a few more bald eagles although none were close enough to get a truly awesome picture but there’s still more time to get one!
The main mission of the morning was to see bears and we managed that. Hopefully some of these pictures will do the bear justice otherwise we’re going to have to come back again!