Day 1 – Sea Lions and Bears
At long last the inaugural Outer Shores Photo Tour was upon us! After all meeting at the Passing Cloud, we went into town for a hearty dinner to break the ice. Upon our return we spent an hour covering optimizing our camera settings to get the best data possible from each digital capture. During the course of the discussion we touched on some of the challenges unique to coastal photography and ways we might mitigate them. Then it was off to bed in preparation for an early start the next morning.
Morning brought bright sunshine with a light frost and we spent a couple of hours just after sunrise photographing sea lions in the bay, as well as practicing our still life compositions on some wild flowers. Once our captain Russ Markel had prepped the boat for departure, we motored out into the Broken Group for our first taste of the wild beauty of Barkley Sound.
It wasn’t long before we spotted a large mixed flock of sea birds hammering a ball of bait fish just below the surface. We immediately took to the zodiac for a closer look and then spent some time cruising around a large estuary known to Russ for its abundant black bears. It didn’t disappoint, and in fact we were treated to a bear foraging on a rocky point a mere 30m from where the Passing Cloud was anchored!
After spending some more time in the estuary after dinner photographing wading birds at low tide we turned in, happy and contented with our first day of capturing life in a pristine coastal ecosystem.
