Where the whale-fishes blow

6th May; Day 7

This hotel, the Tin Wis (the name means 'Calm Waters', apparently) is different again from the others where we've stayed. It's mainly a two-storey building; our room is on the ground floor, with sliding doors onto a patio, from where you walk across an area of lawn to a beautiful Pacific beach.






Today was disappointingly wet, but that didn't deter us from doing one of the activities we'd been looking forward to; whale-watching.

Brrr!


There were only seven of us as paying customers on board a small vessel, and it was a good thing that Ned and I are both pretty good sailors because there was quite a lot of swell, and we would otherwise have been as miserable as the poor Japanese couple who spent the whole of the 3½ hour trip below decks enduring all the phases of seasickness known to man, and couldn't raise their heads to see anything. Ned did wonder whether they were overcome at the sight of all that food not being harpooned, but gave them the benefit of the doubt.

We up above in the fresh air were treated to a display of a group of three humpback whales blowing and banging their tail flukes on the surface, and another in the distance (too far for a photo) breaching.





It was such a thrill - the rule is that boats aren't allowed to go within a certain distance of the whales, but of course nobody's told the whales. Towards the end there were two, swimming side by side directly towards us, then they dived about 100 yards away. I was waiting for their tails to appear for an amazing picture but sadly they didn't. By crikey, it was cold! With all the excitement of actually seeing these beasts we didn't really notice the wet and the chill, but when we were returning to Tofino it really hit us, and I couldn't even put on my gloves because my hands had gone quite numb. On the way back we did a trip to see the sealions



but by then all I really wanted was a hot bath and to be able to feel my blood circulating again. Despite that we wouldn't have missed it for the world.

(And when we got back to the hotel there was an email telling me that Daisy-pup had passed her hearing test, so was ours!)