Bear Blanc and Beachcombed Treasures, August 31, 2014

Princess Royal Island – August 23, 2014

This morning begins for me with more tentative rain showers spattering the hatch cover over the bed. Patrick is already up and on the morning Net – the Great Northern Boaters Net that begins at 7:30 each morning and helps cruising ham radio operators stay in touch. It’s a dawn low tide today and he is watching the shoreline for bears. When the Net is finished I know it’s my turn to crawl out from under the warm covers and take over shore watch. Princess Royal Island is home to the rare, and even more rarely seen white bear the local First Nations people call the Spirit Bear. We have come here in hopes of seeing one.

I pour a second cup of coffee and with my latest paperback novel in hand, get comfortable in the cockpit, scanning for bears at the end of each paragraph. I have only turned a page or two when I see something moving along the rocky bank before me. For a second or two I am frozen in place, not believing the evidence of my own eyes. I snatch up the binoculars and glass the rugged shore below the trees at the high tide line. Yes, a white bear is walking over the rocks in our direction.

In my excitement I have to remind myself not to shout and startle the bear. Thank goodness Patrick has already dropped the dinghy from the davits and has it tied up alongside Tenacious, all ready to go. My voice is shaking when I duck down below to tell Pat what is out there. I scramble below, trying to think of what I’ll need to take: video camera, warm jacket over my pajamas, life vest…anything else??? Yes—we must call our friends Noreen and David, anchored nearby, on the VHF radio and alert them to the sighting. It is amazing to be lucky enough to see one of these bears, let alone to be able to share it with good friends.

Quietly, so as not to frighten the bear back into the woods, our two dinghies slowly putt toward the shore, ahead of the bear. He stalks along calmly in our direction. Full-grown and healthy, in the prime of his life, his thick, lush fur is the color of heavy cream with rusty-toned highlights. His paws are muddy and his claws are long. He walks pigeon-toed. After a few minutes he is close enough that we can determine, with certainty, that he is, indeed, a he, and he seems to have a plan in mind, and knows where he is going.  He grazes on sedge grass for a bit, then continues along the rocks. At one point he ducks down and twists his head to reach under a fallen log for a tempting cluster of black mussels. He tears off a few mouthfuls. We can hear him chewing as his strong jaws make short work of his crunchy, juicy treat. He moves up into the forest and Patrick points out that he is just taking a shortcut across a point of land. We re-position our dinghies for when he comes out the other side. He pops back out as predicted and we continue to gaze at this beautiful creature, moving sure-footedly over the seaweed-covered rocks. The Spirit Bear is a genetic variant, not an albino, of the American black bear, known as ursus americanus Kermode, or Kermode (Ker-MO-dee) bear, for the man who identified the sub-species. I still prefer “Spirit Bear.”

The white bear stops, looks around, poops, then yawns widely before continuing toward the top of the bay where the salmon are jumping. He walks up the creek and finally disappears into the woods.

We are completely enchanted. Our first Spirit Bear!!!

Video (about 4 minutes):  http://youtu.be/Wbp4gs7oaOs

                              Beachcombed Treasures: West coast, Haida Gwaii, August 17, 2014

Sea lions check us out as we head toward SGaang Gwaai

Patrick has just dropped me off at the head of a long, narrow inlet on the Pacific coast of Haida Gwaii. This is “the outside,” wild and largely uncharted. We have wanted to get out here since we came over to Haida Gwaii but didn’t have good enough weather to try it before. Even today we had to brave 6-foot seas (with Jake The Cat feeling the need to ride it out on deck instead of safely down below, probably shortening my life in the process…)  We have heard this is a good year for beachcombing, and for years my dream has been to find one of the beautiful old hand-blown glass fishing floats from Japan. they haven't been used there since the early 1970s when they were replaced by plastic and Styrofoam ones. We have met fellow cruisers who have found glass floats out here. Today will be my chance.

 

Even from our anchorage, far from the shoaling flats, we could see colorful plastic fishing floats washed up along the tide line, so my hopes are high. Ever since we dropped anchor I have been itching to go beachcombing.
 

I wade ashore to find I am walking on the dried husks of thousands of dead velellas, the "by-the-wind sailors" brought by El Nino. Before I knew their true name I was calling them 'sailing jellyfish.' We haven’t seen them before but enjoyed sharing the seas with rank upon rank of these tiny fellow sailors as we headed south from Queen Charlotte City a week ago.  I brought a few aboard and they are beautiful! Their structure reminds me of Chautauqua and our Sunfish sailboat in miniature—an oval “boat” about 2 inches long with a low parabola of transparent “sail” that

extends fore to aft.   Some are completely transparent, with a texture like firm unflavored gelatin, and some seem to have a beautiful blue “boat” with a clear sail. Each tiny body is beautiful with concentric rings. Once they are driven ashore to dry out, they crunch underfoot. It sounds as if I am walking on potato chips. Aside from that the only sounds are those of kingfishers and tiny brown shorebirds, watching me curiously and peeping away. They are surprisingly unafraid and let me approach quite closely before they flit off to another perch just a few feet away, cocking their heads to see where I might go next.

 I see deer tracks and their scat first, then the deer themselves, also calmly browsing on the salty fronds of kelp washed ashore.  They pay no attention to the two-legged creature temporarily sharing their domain. They have boundaries however, and I find I can’t get much closer than 20 feet before they glance up from their grazing and take a few steps away. Still, I get the feeling they don’t see many humans. They have no fear of me.
Flotsam and jetsam are scattered everywhere from the waterline all the way up into the

woods far above the high tide line. As I traverse up and down the shore I find every kind of bottle; plastic ones for water, shampoo, Sriracha sauce, soda and myriad others with labels in English, Japanese and a few other languages I can’t positively identify. Surprising to me, I also find lots of glass, mostly alcohol bottles, including some very pretty ones that I think are sake bottles from Japan. I inspect each one for a message inside. I am repeatedly disappointed but hope springs eternal… I can’t help but wonder how much of this stuff was set adrift by the huge tsunami that wreaked such havoc in Japan a few years ago.

There are toothbrushes, hairbrushes, combs and medicine bottles. There are an intriguing number of hardhats, mostly yellow or white. I find two portable toilets (both sans seat), a large portable propane tank and any number of fishnets  and ropes impossibly tangled in the drift logs. I cross paths with ping pong balls, a golf ball, several still-very-bouncy rubber balls, two soccer balls and a red, white and blue basketball. I find automobile wheels – not just the tires, but entire wheels. Then I find a portable toilet seat --presumably from one of the toilets I found earlier. And a complete set of plastic shower curtain rings. A Styrofoam model of a lighthouse makes me laugh. And wedged under a log, there is a very waterlogged leather briefcase, empty but complete with combination locks and filing compartments. Someone decided to chuck civilization and return to Nature?

Then I notice how many different kinds of footwear I’m seeing. I find everything from flip-flops and sneakers to sea boots in a wide variety of sizes and brands. The sheer volume of footwear is actually fairly alarming. I really hope all of these shoes were accidentally left on beaches or something equally benign.

And everywhere, large and small, plastic and Styrofoam, some netted and some not, with or without tether, I find fishing floats. There area few big black ones that could serve as a bathtub if cut in half. There are head-sized orange ones that look like globes with latitude and longitude lines and Japanese characters, little blue ones with “ears” that look like Mickey Mouse and basketball-sized aluminum ones that are scuffed and scarred as if by battle. Floats are all over the place. We have even seen them adrift, sometimes free and sometimes mired in a floating snarl of kelp . But I am on the hunt for the older, pre-plastic glass floats.

I find my first one nestled in beach-washed kelp and the dried carcasses of sailing jellies. I pause to enjoy the moment of my first glass float find. It is a pretty shade of pale blue and the pontil mark on the bottom, where it was blown, is thick and a darker shade of blue. The glass is worn and looks almost frosted.

The second one I find is quite astonishing. It is larger than my head and still has the remnants of the knots that tethered it to its fish net many years ago. It has clearly been at sea for a very long time. A Japanese oyster has grown into the pontil mark on the glass!

This large one is green, and so big that I'm not quite sure how I'm going to carry it along with me as I continue the hunt. Luckily I brought a plastic grocery bag with handles and it just fits. Subsequent finds will have to be stuffed into my pockets!

My luck continues and when I run out of beach and the tide is squeezing me between its encroaching wavelets and the treeline, I have 11 glass floats sized from about 3 inches across to the really big one, about 12 inches, in various containers and pockets about my person.

Another one of my sailing dreams has come true this summer. I love the "outside!"