Beach Clean Up
Beautiful
Day
We woke up in Island Bay and we wanted to end the day at
the very southern end of Gwaii Haanas which included a big
trip around Burnaby Island. We woke up with Rissos
Dolphins that we went to bed with the night before.
As we headed out to the ocean, we two saw Dall's Porpoise heading
out into Hecate Straight. Dall's Porpoises are fast - they
often bow ride large ships going 20+ knots. While the
Island Solitude is a nice ride, it's not fast enough to keep up
with Dall's and they were soon gone.
We continued sailing out to Hecate Straight and then
South. We spotted common birds (Pigeon Guillemot), less
common birds (the only time I saw Ancient Murrelet on the trip)
and birds new to me (Northern Fulmar). We spotted two
humpback whales traveling together, but they were faster than us
and soon disappeared.
Garcin Rocks
Sea Lion haul outs are well known in BC -
sea lions are often nocturnal and haul out in the same place year
after year which makes it easier to monitor their
populations. It also makes it easy to see them if you happen
to be driving by.
Bowles Point
We are near to the southern end of the Haida
Gwaii and only small islands block our view of the open ocean -
next stop, Japan. Open Ocean beaches are known to collect
garbage from all of the world, but much of it from Asia. We
were dropped off on the sheltered side of Bowles Point to go do a
bit of a beach clean up.
Bowles point has a thin neck so we walked
across on a rarely used trail. We can thank the deer for
making this trail passable and pretty quickly we popped out on the
open ocean side of the point.
The beach was a wide sandy crescent and any protected space from
behind driftwood all the way up the edge of the forest was thick
with plastic bottles, fishing floats and lots of other
detritus. Elan brought a bunch of garbage bags and we set
off in our own directions to pick up and fill the bags. It's
a bit tricky - do you bring the garbage to the bag, or the bag to
the garbage - it depends on how much you find.
The biggest find was a bumper that would be used on a large
boat. We found an orange float that still had a readable
label from it's manufacture.
People spread out and collected small garbage from one end of the
beach to the other. One end of the beach had tide pools that
were nice to look in.
Once we had the majority of stuff ready to go, we headed back to
the calm bay and went back to the sailboat. A few volunteers
took the zodiak around and they loaded it up with all of our
garbage. The solitude has two zodiacs so one was now full
and one was still usable for going to shore.
We anchored for the night near the Gordon Islands. There was
a humpback or two in this bay that was using "tail flicking" as a
way of feeding. It was near the end of the day so there was
very little light to work with but we did watch the whale until it
was dark.
Being the open ocean, there was lots of
seabirds surfacing and swimming by. What an amazing evening.
Tags: marine mammal(6), dolphin(3), beach(2), whale(2), triptych(1), derelict(1)
People: Nara(3), Claira(2), Helen(1)
From: John Harvey Photo > John's Overnight Page > Haida Gwaii > Beach Clean Up
Last Modified Monday, October 2nd, 2023 at 20:43:33 Edit
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