June 19, 2010
Today was a pretty nice day. We were supposed to go whale watching at 10am, but I received a call to our room right before we left telling us that they didn’t book enough people to go out, so they wanted us to wait for the 1:30pm trip. After realizing that we didn’t have anything better to do, we agreed to wait. We had to check out of the room by 11am, so we went down to the ocean after that and hung out there for the remaining 2 hours. The scenery is just like those British Columbia commercials, amazingly calm and pleasant.
Once we got to Sea Quest (whale watching office) we left our bags in their office and suited up after a little more waiting. I’ve put a couple of pictures in the gallery below of the jumpsuits they had us put on. We got on the boat pretty quickly (12 of us) and started off into the San Juan Island area to find the whales. Apparently they get 3 or 4 different families of whales that come out every single Summer to feast on the salmon out here. The ride out was real fun, we were going about 27 knots over some turbulent waters so it made for a great ride. It took about 20 minutes to get to the whales and it was fantastic. It’s not like whale watching back home in Long Beach where they hope to catch a whale on the tour; these guys know there are whales and they really do group up (we saw about 17-18 of them). It was hard to catch pictures of them as they leapt out of the water or blew water out of their blow holes, but I managed to get a couple of decent shots. The driver turned off the engine of the boat once we were within about 100 meters, but the whales found their way over to us and at one point came straight at us and under our boat (there’s a few close up shots in the picture gallery that weren’t zoomed). After a while on the wavy waters, I started getting a little bit seasick (we were out there for 3 hours), nothing too bad, but some of those waves were not comfortable in the least bit. I wasn’t the only one, when I looked around on our small boat, about 6 of the others were sitting and trying to settle their nausea. On the ride back we made a pit stop near some seals and private islands and then headed straight back for Sidney. Once back, we headed for the bus stop.
It was about a 20 minute bus ride into Victoria, then a 20-30 minute walk to our hotel. This should be our last wait in British Columbia before we get our bikes early Monday morning. We ate at the bar on the second floor of the hotel and then watched some of the open mic night performers before heading in for the night.
