Jackson Narrows Provincial Marine Park/Traveling Southbound
We awoke to heavy rain and thick, gray overcast this morning, but all that changed as we began our morning outings. The clouds parted and that great yellow orb of light, the sun, shone through to warm us and dry away the rain from the night. During the morning we had the opportunity to take a hike along a coastal meadow, cruise the spectacular narrows in Zodiacs and some of us even got into kayaks to glide on the placid water surface and explore this beautiful British Columbia waterway. Although it is easy to focus on finding the charismatic megafauna like bears, our rewards today came from sightings in the air and in the water. Huge sea stars and sun stars, spiny sea urchins and mats of blue mussels, barnacles and rockweed were all there to peak our interest and our enjoyment. Sandhill cranes, merlin falcons, sharp-shinned hawks, Northwest crows, belted kingfishers and bald eagles flew overhead or perched on the dense wall of trees and bushes that lined the narrows. Ridge after ridge of forested mountains rose steeply from the waterline, polished by the continental glaciers that receded 10,000 years ago to leave us with this lush and dramatic landscape surrounding the fjords. As we took layers of clothing off to accommodate the increasing temperature, we also delved deeper into the layers of beauty and majesty of this incredible rainforest.
When we exited the Narrows to continue our way ever southward, two humpback whales greeted us in the main marine corridor. One was a larger animal with a completely black under-tail fluke and the other smaller with a beautiful white wisp on the trailing edge of its fluke. We first saw them separated by about a half mile, but then they joined together making their way northward at a leisurely pace, showing us their magnificent and massive heads, blowing a huge spout and then gliding along with their dorsal fin just out of the water. Perhaps it was a female with her 1 ½ year old offspring, although we don’t have records of that long a bond between mothers and their young, or it could have just been two unrelated whales that ended up here in the inland waterway, passing the time together before heading south to their winter grounds along the Mexican coast. In the warm, sun-drenched silence of the fjord, the curtain of spout-vapor and the sound of the whales’ blows engulfed us on deck with a peaceful and contented sense of wellbeing here in the wilds of Pacific Canada.
The rest of the afternoon was spent on deck or listening to David Stephen’s fabulous talk on Northwest Art and Culture and was capped with a large flock of Sandhill cranes flying overhead and leading us south on the last few days of our journey from Alaska to the lower 48.
