Dominique Vallée

20.09.2010 | comments [0]

Went on my friend Helen’s family boat last week with her parents near all Vancouver Island.

It was something I wanted to do for years, actually since as long I’ve been living here. There is hundreds of big and small islands from Victoria to Alaska filled with marine life and virgin beautiful land.

We left Squamish to drive down to Tsawwassen to catch the ferry where the boat was just a minute drive away. We set off and within 10 minutes we saw dolphins. Another 15 minutes later we set a crab trap not too far form where we anchored for the night in Sydney Spit.  We started cooking an awesome dinner with wine and after 2 hours we went to check the crab trap and we had 13 crabs waiting for us. After going trough all of them we kept 4 huge males for tomorrow night’s dinner. Killing them with a dull butcher knife was the most challenging and nerve-racking thing ever as they tried to crab the knife while you concentrate on trying to come down with a clean cut. Like a bad horror movie and I almost fell off the boat my first try.

The next day after a long walk on the island and finding chestnut tree and filling up like a squirrel we set off again up to the North. For 2 hours we were fortunate to follow about 20 killer whales. Was unreal!

We went to Galileo Island and had a crab feast with a beautiful sunset and was early to bed to sleep like a rock at the bottom of the water.

Rising to another beautiful day and a walk around we then sent back South where the bad weather was coming in. Helen and I tried to push our luck fishing but after two 15 min sessions we decided that maybe that wasn’t our thing. We went and caught 2 more huge crabs and decided to butcher them like 2 cave women.

We woke up our last morning with fog so thick we could see anything or go anywhere. We finally got back to port in time to catch the 1pm ferry to come back to reality.

Here are a few photos.

 dom