Butchart/Whales

Started: 2022-09-12 19:55:59

Submitted: 2022-09-12 21:34:33

Visibility: World-readable

Returning to The Butchart Gardens, twenty years later; and whale watching in the Strait of Juan de Fuca

The first thing we did on the morning of Saturday, the 30th of July was go back to The Butchart Gardens.

Kiesa and I visited Butchart Gardens on our honeymoon to Victoria twenty years ago (and ran into my grandparents). This time we didn't run into anyone.

The gardens are a brisk drive north of Victoria along provincial highway 17. (As soon as we crossed the border into Canada, Google Maps started showing us distances in kilometers. Kiesa dug up the manual for our car to set the dashboard displays to kilometers to match the road signs. The most important part was the speed, avoiding the possible failure mode of seeing a numerically-higher speed limit in kilometers-per-hour and interpreting it as faster miles-per-hour.)

As we drove into the gardens I tried to remember visiting the gardens twenty years ago. I vaguely recognized the entry sign (the place where I spotted my grandfather) and the sunken gardens, built in the hole formed by an old rock quarry and aggressively landscaped within an inch of its life.

The gardens were beautiful and also rather stiff and formal: every plant, every leaf, every flower, even every blade of grass was in its right place. None of the plants were identified, which I'd expect from a normal arboretum; though to be fair we were clearly not in a normal arboretum. (We received a brochure that vaguely identified a couple of plants and said that labeling the plants would detract from visitor's experience in the gardens, which clearly did not represent my experience.)

One thing I did recognize was the "Fountain of the Three Sturgeons", which I photographed in 2002 with an obscure caption, apparently because I neglected to record what precisely the fountain was supposed to represent.

The whole experience of the gardens was spectacular, and our visit provided an interesting callback to our last visit to the gardens twenty years ago.

We drove back to Victoria, ate lunch at a bahn mi place downtown, and walked along the peninsula on the south bank of the outer harbour (past the small boats docked on the piers in the harbour and the the ferry docks; the Victoria Clipper sat docked between her one daily round-trip from Seattle, while MV Coho was steaming across the Strait) to Fisherman's Wharf. We checked in for our whale watching tour, then we had about half an hour before we needed to return to actually board the boat. We wandered the crowded wharf under the hot mid-day sun and got ice cream to eat in the park opposite the wharf.

We boarded the ship Wild 4 Whales, a 60-foot catamaran that advertised its speed and range compared to the numerous other whale watching boats operating out of Victoria Harbour. The crew briefed us on safety and we boarded the boat to depart. I grabbed a seat at the front of the boat, in the open-air section ahead of the large glass windows protecting the interior seating with a commanding view ahead of the boat (and, to be fair, the back of the heads of the people sitting in front of me).

We pulled out of the harbour and cruised into the bay at the entrance to the harbour, still relatively protected from the prevailing winds by the land mass to the west. As the boat picked up speed the air temperature dropped from hot to warm, and eventually to pleasantly brisk. After several days in a warmer-than-normal Victoria I appreciated the experience of feeling cool again. I stayed in my short sleeves until I felt properly cold, then started adding layers as necessary.

We spent the first hour of the cruise close to shore, heading into and out of little coves as we looked for wildlife. Along the way we saw some of the human history of the coast, including several lighthouses, one of them on a smaller island off the coast. (All of Victoria is actually on Vancouver Island, though by the standards of the smaller islands it almost counts as a "mainland".)

We turned into the Strait of Juan de Fuca and I put on my last layer, a lightweight shell, to protect me from the wind blowing in from the ocean. We entered the next phase of the trip, which our guide referred to as "whale waiting". The boat looked for the spray of a whale exhaling as it surfaced after diving, then we'd try to spot it on the surface before it dove again. We saw several humpback whales; and also we saw other whale-watching boats watch the whales. Some of the other boats were smaller boats with low hulls and outboard motors; these boats provided full-body suits to protect passengers from the wind and waves as the boat sped across the strait. That seemed a bit more adventurous than I required.

Soon I remembered the rhythm of the whale sighting:

1. The whale surfaces and we see a puff of vapor as the whale clears its blowhole. Someone notices it first and points, and we all look there;
2. The whale surfaces and we see the distinctive hump on its back;

3. The whale begins to dive; its tail rises as the whale dives, breaking the surface then submerging after the whale;
4. We start counting for the whale to return, hopefully in three to five minutes.

Our boat decided to flex its range and cruised across the border towards the Olympic Peninsula, where we looked for evidence of whales lurking in the silty waters close to shore, but no whales presented themselves.

We cruised back across the strait to Vancouver Island and lingered around Race Rocks, where we saw a bunch of sea lions hauled out on the low rocks poking just out of the water. (These appeared to be northern sea lions, which were better behaved than the California sea lions, who bark incessantly at each other like frat boys.)

The tide was coming in, and it was flowing around the low rocks forming Race Rocks, forming distinctive patterns of eddies and whirlpools as the water flowed past the rocks. The boat had to motor at low speed to maintain position next to the rocks.

We departed the Race Rocks and headed back to Victoria. On our way I noticed an interesting optical artifact around the horizon: right above the horizon I saw what appeared to be an inverted reflection of the image on the horizon. On shore this made the buildings in Victoria look like they were many stories higher than they were in reality. It was hard to understand what I was seeing just by looking at the image (the mirage was too small to clearly identify it), but it held up in my camera at maximum zoom, allowing me to get a photo. The best example I saw looked like a ship (probably a Canadian Coast Guard vessel), lurking under the ghostly image of Mount Baker in the afternoon haze. (Wikipedia tells me that this is the result of a particular kind of temperature gradient right above the surface, refracting the light and forming a weird double horizon.)

Back on shore we walked downtown for supper. As an appetizer I ate (according to the menu) "Crispy fried Brussels sprouts tossed with maple syrup and Parmesan cheese finished with garlic aioli"; this seemed like a Canadian/Santa Cruz fusion food (since Brussels sprouts are grown in Santa Cruz), and I took notes so I could attempt to reproduce the dish in the future.