Hello from Masset! Monday, July 09, 2007

So we've had 4 days on the water so far and have reached the town of Masset, 90 nautical miles from Skidegate where we started! This is the last town we'll pass on Graham Island, from here on there are no roads or settlements and we're heading towards the exposed West coast. So we made the most of a hot meal cooked by someone else tonight ( no offence to Leon, who has done a great job of keeping our bellies full of fuel every other night!). It was interesting to walk through Old Masset, the Haida village tonight. There are loads of amazing totem poles and we saw dozens of bald eagles and ravens flying incredibly close overhead. The locals were feeding the birds their fish scraps so the birds were swooping down low to fight over them.

The coastline so far has been mainly a low lying beach. We'd been expecting this section to be quite monotonous but were pleased to find that it constantly changed from black pebbles to white sand to huge boulders, with dunes, cliffs or dense forest behind it. Always there are hundreds of huge logs strewn on the top of the beach. Fortunately we haven't had the sort of weather that put them there as it was pretty calm for the first 3 days, allowing us to make some good distance. yesterday we rounded "Rose Spit', an amazing 3km long curving sand spit that marks the NE tip of Graham island into what the locals call Long Nose. We basically paddled 6km or more to end up within 100metres of where we started (!) but we couldn't bring ourselve to portage it!!

We saw our first whale today - a playful Grey Whale who was doing some strange but impressive maneovers with it's fin on the water. He came within 15 metres of us at one point which was incredile ( and a little scary when you have an expensive camera in your hands!). Just after seeing the whale, and passing 'Tow Head', a basalt mound that pokes out of the flat earth from nowhere, the wind picked up and we ended up battling into about 15knots of wind for most of the day... hopefully not the sign of things to come!

Overall we've having an amazing time in a beautiful country. Can't wait for the rest of it!!