whales | Snorkeling the ABC Islands

Today we decided to do some “crabbing,” a popular activity here on the Oregon Coast. There is a long dock here at the resort, dedicated to crabbers. So we got our ring, attached some raw chicken and tossed it in the ocean. Every 5-10 minutes you pull it up and hope you get some dungeness crabs. There are always a lot of crabs in the net, but most are red rock crabs, not the greatest eating, but still lots of fun and excitement every time you pull up the crab trap!

The talk of the day though, was the pod of killer whales who made their way through the inner harbor here in Newport. It had the town in a tizzy, that’s for sure! All the locals were in shock… one guy told us that he’d been here twenty nine years, and no whale had ever been in the harbor, let alone a whole pod of orcas!

The whales were right off the break water, less than 30 feet from us on the crab dock! They were obviously hunting, looking for the seals that are all over the harbor. I tell you, it was really amazing to see them so close. I’ve been to orca shows, but nothing comes close to the experience of seeing them “in the wild” so close, you could almost touch them.

After they moved off down the harbor, we came back to the room, and were getting ready to go for dinner, when the pod came back into sight, moving back towards the harbor exit! They smacked their tails on the water, breached and rolled and came so very close to our deck it was unreal! Totally fascinating to see whales, just unreal.

After the “show,” we headed to dinner and our waitress wanted to know if we’d seen the whales! She talked about what an honor it was to see them, how she’d lived here all her life and never seen a whale in the harbor. It was a really special day, that’s for sure!

Greater Vancouver has about 1.6 million people. But “Greater Vancouver” includes a number of smaller municipalities including Burnaby (home of Metrotown the ultimate shopping center) Richmond (near the airport) and New Westminster and Surrey (on the river to the south of downtown Vancouver).

This picture was taken during our first trip to Vancouver, in early 1985. This harbor is now dominated by the Sails of the Convention Centre, but I put this older picture up to remind us of what we may have lost.

While we are blessed with great natural beauty all around us, our presence serves only to drive it further away. Stanley Park is visible in the picture quite clearly on the mid-left of the picture. It is a large inner city park within the boundaries of the city. It welcomes the sea traveler to the city, forming the southern tip of the harbor entrance.

The North Shore Mountains are covered by clouds in the picture’s background, which is not an infrequent occurrence in the winter. They get lots of rain over there!

And right in Stanley Park, the Vancouver Aquarium is home to many forms of marine life. Although the whale shows have been curtailed because the politically correct have convinced everyone that they are cruel, we’ve included a picture of them anyway! I think we’ve only been back to the aquarium once since they’ve stopped the shows. I think we could have made a marvelous enclosure for them, but instead we sent them away to die.

(This post was actually from an older HTML based website I created back in the early days. Pam and I have had an on-line presence since 1985. We ran a multi-line bbs for years, and have had over fifty different websites!)

Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao