As you can see from our track we have been spending most nights in remote anchorages along the north coast of British Columbia between Cape Caution and the Dixon Entrance – gateway to Southeast Alaska. B.C. is said to have 16,000 miles of coastline, only 1,600 of which we have so far seen.
Among many extraordinarily seductive anchorages, tonight’s stop in McMicking Inlet on Campania Island is the wildest and most remote yet. During the morning’s passage we travelled for a time with a pod of Dall’s porpoise that surfed in our bow wave, and passed several humpbacks blowing, breaching and flashing their flukes.
Entering into this inlet is like floating into a wild nature film. Campania Island projects a series of rocky bald peaks skyward to starboard, while to port lies a low wooded shore giving protection from the open Pacific.
Today is the third day of unusually warm and sunny weather, making the broad sand beaches at low tide at the inlet’s entrance seem like an evergreen Caribbean, where many species of unusual birds are roosting and feeding along the shore.
We are swinging on our anchor alone for the night with the only apparent hazards being deer flies and enormous lion’s mane jellyfish.
Birds observed today:
- Tufted Puffins
- Marbled Murrelets
- Long-billed Murrelets
- Mergansers
- Osprey
- Bald Eagles
- Golden Eagles
- and the ubiquitous Gulls
“This land lying west of west represents a concentration of what one might call geographic essence, as if the nature and spirit of a much larger region were compressed into a space too small for it to plausibly hold.”
– John Valliant, The Golden Spruce.