After a restful sleep, we woke and wandered over to the main house, over frosty ground. We ate a lovely breakfast of eggs, and then relaxed inside a bit. Jess’ parents let us borrow the car for the day, so we did a bit of exploring around San Juan, went to the whale museum, which is all about the wildlife in the area. There are three main pods of orca that hang out around here during summer, and you can usually see them from the shore, as they chase Salmon who are spawning from a river nearby. These orca are quite specific, they only like the best salmon, king salmon, which mostly come from the Fraser River nearby. To find this out, they analyse orca poo, and can determine that is pretty much what they eat. Fussy things.
They keep track of all the individual orca in the area, and identify them by their dorsal fin and markings.
After the museum we wandered around the dock, town, then headed out to English camp, where there was an English army base, which existed during the time before they decided if the island belonged to the Americans or English. Took them a while to figure out. There was a nice walk through some forest, and a view from the top of the hill, where you could see many of the bays around, and all the way over to Canada.
We then wandered along the water looking for seals and otters, but didn’t manage to find any. Found a couple of deer in the field, and then a couple of deer on the road on the way home. Silly deer.
It is now very chilly, the internet tells me about 1 degree c,with a slight chance of snow overnight, but we are snuggled inside, and dinner is cooking! It is lovely to be staying at a friends’ home, and dinner was delishuz, and included an experimental dessert of avocado mousse 🙂
10pm – headed off to get stuff to do teeth, but it has been snowing! Of course, then only thing to do is jump in the hot tub in the dark, surrounded by pines, and softly falling snow. Epic.
Dale and Becca 