Happy 53rd Birthday to me

I woke up this morning to find that Karen had decorated the condo with streamers and a banner. Today besides being my birthday, it is the first day in quite a few where there was no sleeping in. One of my gifts was an 8:30am whale watching tour ($123.75 CAD / person including taxes) with Jamie’s Whaling Station. Reminder … for subsequent birthdays no activities should be planned on that day before 10am.

After we arrived at Jamie’s, we got checked in and made our way down to the dock. When we got on the boat, we counted and there were only fourteen of us in total including Captain Chris and deckhand Amber. Because there were so few of us, this would make it easy to move from side to side to take pictures.

We left the harbour and very quickly spotted a grey whale. We are off to a good start. We then found Jake the otter who was very cute. It was about an hour in when Chris spotted a very small boat with Jim Darling who is a whale biologist. That meant that there had to be whales in the area and sure enough there were. In total, we saw four whales in a bay including a mama and her calf. We probably spent almost an hour waiting and watching. On the way back to the harbour, we saw a small island full of sea lions.

Once we got back on land, we picked up lunch from Red Can Gourmet which we had back at the condo. We still had an hour or so before our next activity, so we grabbed our stuff and went down to the beach to have a quick nap.

It was time to go back to Tofino for the second part of my gift from Karen … a coastal flight with Tofino Air. We got down to the dock and met our pilot Chris. Along with us on the flight was a couple from Sweden. As we were boarding the plane, Chris says sit wherever you want. The couple took the back row and I said since it is my birthday, I’ll sit up front. Karen had the entire middle row to herself.

All I can say about the flight was that it was awesome. The flight in total was about thirty minutes and you are flying over beautiful coastline. It was so cool to see the beaches that we had visited yesterday from the air. You really get a sense of how big those beaches are. At one point, Chris circled an area where there was a whale watching boat and we got to see what was likely the mama whale and calf that we had seen earlier in the day. You do not get a sense of how big a whale is until you see it from the air. It was the size of the boat. We even flew by Cox Bay Beach and we were able to see the resort we are staying at. The time went by so fast and soon I could see Tofino Harbour which meant our trip was over.