Last week, I traded the routine of everyday life for a five-day holiday in beautiful but not sunny B.C. The official reason for the trip was to attend the second annual Canadian farm safety conference put on by the Canadian Coalition for Agricultural Safety and Rural Health.
It was an excellent conference, but as I had gone along on this one mostly as a wife rather than a delegate, I didn’t feel at all badly about taking time off to do other things. One of those things was whale watching.
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Thus it was that I found myself repeating, like a mantra, “We’re having fun.”
Fun, that is, if your idea of enjoyment is skimming across the water of the Strait of Juan de Fuca in an open boat at 35 miles per hour on a chilly, grey, October day.
There were nine of us on board that day; when we signed up, we had been warned that at this time of year there was less than a 50-percent chance of any sightings, but we had been lucky.
We had found a pod of four killer whales and had followed them for several miles, magnificent black and white creatures, surfacing and diving almost soundlessly, leaving their watery “footprints” behind.
Now we, in tandem with two other boats, were spread out across the water searching for a lone humpback whale.
We never did find it, but we did find porpoises which swam exuberantly in front of and beside the boat, scurrying just under the surface, taking a quick dive, now on this side, now on the other.
After our brief, relatively warm hiatus porpoise-watching, it was off again across the open water to visit a colony of male sea lions who met us with grunts, squeals and a truly indescribable odor which led one to speculate that there is probably more than one reason why the males spend the winter on these bleak towers of rock segregated from the females.
A quick look at some harbor seals, who ignored us, a check on an eagle’s nest and its adult occupants, then it was back to the inner harbor and warmth.
For someone from a Saskatchewan farm, those three hours on the water were a unique experience, one which I confess to appreciating more in hindsight than at the time.
As we headed back to the inner harbor and warmth, I confess that I was thinking not about the wonders of nature, but rather about a hot shower and how glad I was for the four layers of clothing under the padded yellow jumpsuit.
