Pictographs and Pacific White-sides September 6

It’s been a month since I posted, and we’ve traveled many miles since then. We left Alaska and started south with every prospect of beautiful weather, so we chose a route that would take us out toward the Pacific rather than the more protected Inside Passage route. We anchored overnight in the islands of the Goose Group and explored several of them. You can get a sense of the “wild coast” from the tortured beach wrack in this picture. Among the bleached and scoured logs I found a bottle with Cyrillic script on the label. From the picture of a human molar and the ‘minty-fresh’ smell of what was left of the contents, I guessed that it was mouthwash—all the way from Russia. Another foray turned up a pack of cards from Shanghai, China (missing only the 3 of clubs, but with both Jokers.) Patrick and I took the dinghy to a kayaker camp on another island. It is thought to have been built by a local character called Kayak Bill, who built elaborate camps out of driftwood and beach detritus all over this coast. Something of a hermit, he disappeared several years ago, assumed to have drowned, poor man. We explored his camp, then followed a little trail through the woods to the other side of the island. I found a deer antler on the beach there, along with a number of fishing floats; alas, not the glass ones, though I searched and searched.

From there we meandered down along the outer coast. We stopped to find some pictographs we had read about, and I recorded photos of the site, latitude and longitude information about the location, and sent it in to a web site that is collecting such data about sites of pictographs (rock paintings) and petroglyphs (rock carvings) along the coast. I wonder what they were. Chiefs? Ancestors? Bottle openers? I continue researching and reading about the First Nation tribes that lived here.

We rounded Cape Caution again, with milder seas than the last time thank goodness, and are back in the Broughton Archipelago. While watching for orcas near Blackfish Pass we came across these sea lions who were not only extremely vocal; they were quite smelly. Patrick counted 84 that we could count from the boat. The big beachmasters wrestled and bumped with the smaller bulls. You should have heard the barking, groaning, burbling and fussing going on. Everybody had something to say.

We revisited Bond Sound to see if the salmon were running. Boy, were they! We could see them along the shoreline on both sides of the sound, running in thick, almost solid lines toward Little Ahta Creek at the head of the sound. Frequently, a salmon – or two or three at a time – would perform a series of leaps out of the water, slapping down on their sides, apparently practicing for their up-river journey. We took the dinghy up the creek as far as the depth and deadfall allowed, then hiked about 1 ½ miles to the bottom of a waterfall. In pools and eddies along the way we could see groups of dozens of salmon undulating just enough to stay in place against the current, waiting for some inner message to tell them to go forward toward the spawning ground. Every so often a group would begin thrashing fins and tails to cross a shallow rocky patch to the next pool.

Though we didn’t see any bears on that trip, we dodged messy piles of bear scat all over the trail and shore. Also scattered rather liberally about were plenty of freshly eviscerated salmon carcasses, so we knew the bears couldn’t be far away. We saw a number of eagles and I found a half-dozen large eagle feathers; white tail feathers, long dark-brown pinion feathers, and even down feathers that the Kwakwaka’wakw Indians use in their welcome dances. When we returned to where we had left the dinghy, we found the tide was still too high to cross a little channel we had waded through on our way in, so we lay down on the creek bank in the sunshine and drowsed away half an hour as the water level fell. Bees droned among the white yarrow and wild buttercups that dotted the tall grass, and a light breeze cooled us from our hike back to the creek delta. It was a perfect way to spend our 18th anniversary.

The next morning Patrick awoke early to see what the night had brought to our prawn trap in a deep spot across the sound from our anchorage. As he hand-pulled the 350 feet of line attached to the trap, watching the salmon jumping all around him, he heard a loud rushing sound. He quickly identified the source as a large pod of Pacific white-sided dolphins bounding along the shoreline, hunting together for salmon. He finished pulling in the trap (which contained a nice catch of truly colossal spot prawns) and radioed me aboard Tenacious. His call found me still in bed in my pajamas, but I was galvanized into instant action when he told me to get ready to go see the dolphins. He was already roaring across to the sound to pick me up. I grabbed my life jacket, threw on the first jacket I came across (which turned out to be one of Pat’s) and put the video recorded around my neck. We zipped over toward the hunting pod and then slowed as we approached them, about 100 yards away and running parallel to their path. In moments the curious creatures had come over to meet their visitors, swimming around and under the inflatable dinghy. They swam alongside us as we putted slowly, turning to one side or the other to look up at us from the water. As they crowded in to see us, we were bumped several times and even splashed as a couple of them jumped out of the water within inches of our gunwales. In the lower left of photo above you can just see a corner of the dinghy.

Then, quick as a flash, they left us to return to the business of salmon fishing. One dolphin leaped completely out of the water 13 times in a row, each time coming down to the water and slapping its tail loudly on the surface of the water. We wondered what message that must have communicated to the pod. A few dolphins stayed with us, rolling and diving all around us. I wanted to touch one; they were quite close enough to do so, and I left my hand in the water for a while until I remembered a visit to a local museum dedicated to whales where I had seen a skeleton of a Pacific white-side and pictured the teeth. What if my fingers looked like something good to eat?

The dolphins left us and returned to us several times. Seagulls filled the sky above us with their raucous cries, hoping to cadge salmon scraps from the feeding. A mother and baby dolphin humped out of the water just in front of us. It was a magical morning.