Pacific NW

Expeditions

A lone bear was perched atop a rocky outcropping beside the boat when I poked my head out of the hatch this morning. Clouds are gathering in. We toured through more iceberg-choked passages and glacier faces of Northwestern Fjord. Some of the rocks have crazy zigzagging bands of rainbow colors on them, where the seaweeds meet the mosses, lichens, and mineral stains. We brought Silent Partner into “Cataract Cove” that had dozens of waterfalls pouring down from a cirque from a height of 3,000 feet. I maneuvred into “the grotto”, a tiny notch in the cliff, and almost touched the bows to the cliffs and waterfalls. Next we motored out to Cloudy Cape in an ominous building swell. The shoreline here rises vertically from the sea for several thousand feet and is extremely forbidding and unforgiving. The feelings it produces are of awe and fear combined with a dream-like quality. We would expect to see rock fortresses, men in chain-mail shooting bows and arrows, and unicorns. Instead there is just a vast loneliness, for the region is too hostile for human habitation. Scarcely a tree grows off of Cloudy Cape, just a low thickness of scrub alder and willow, if they can gain a perch on the high cliffs. In one sense the land seems barren. But then we see all these bears on the shore. Today we spotted a half-dozen Humpback whales and a pod of killer whales feeding off the lonely capes. We anchored in 150 feet of water off of Cloudy Cape with hopes of catching a Halibut. We got a few strikes but didn’t pull any up. The current held us broadside to the swell which we soon tired of, so we headed to Thunder Bay. So help me god, I will never return to Thunder Bay. Read on.