Guest normally arrive at the Lodge from Campbell River between three and four o’clock. Once rooms have been sorted out, guests settled in, snacks on the front deck and Angus’s talk about the lodge and your visit’s itinerary it is time for the first tour. The first evening is a trip in the local waters looking for black bears, bald eagles, seals and even on occasion a grizzly bear. The trip is an hour plus depending on what is found and is used to familiarize you with the boats and guides.
Every day on the whale watching safari trips that leave Grizzly Bear Lodge is different. On the day of this picture we were sitting several hundred meters (yards) off shore as a pod of orca were passing. The whale watching guidelines specify that you are to be two hundred meters from the shore if whales are in shore of your boat or one hundred meters in open water. The regulations are in force by an organization known as Strait Watch and on this day they were less than seventy-five meters behind our boat. One of the whales in the pod turned from the shore and surfaced beside our boat, swam around the boat and then under the boat and resurfaced on the other side. Strait Watch came over after the orca had moved on and were interested in our pictures, they thought that the orca was fishing under the boat and became curious as dolphins are by nature interested in their surroundings. The reason is not as important as the great pictures.
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