A SHORELINE SYMPHONY

A nippy surfer's paradise

We felt a little overdressed as we arrived for our beach hike – most people were in wetsuits.

Colourful rock pool

It was low tide and the rock pools were alive with barnacles and anemones.  

On the sand dunes, the Kinnikinnick bearberry plant was a colourful backdrop, its trailing branches, dark green leaves and bright red berries providing food for birds and bears.

The lowly beach hopper

Driftwood lay in lazy formations on the beach making an ideal home for a variety of the ecosystem’s residents.  

Bear scat

Tell tale piles of bear scat, rich in undigested salal berries, lay in a bed of muscle shells near one jumbled heap of driftwood.  

That, together with some evidence of digging, indicated that a bear had recently been in search of beach hoppers.

The original Wick

The headlands we were exploring on Wickaninnish Beach lie in the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve. The original Wickaninnish Inn serves as the Park's visitors centre and has a striking resemblance to the current hostelry on Chesterman Beach further down the coast. 

Meares Island on the horizon

The outgoing tide had left uniform patterns in the sand. Looking out to the horizon coastal fog was moving in, creating a surreal landscape. In the distance, the old growth forests of Meares Island looked positively blue in the haze.

Bull kelp littered the beach. 

Carbon monoxide expelled from
the bull kelp's hollow float

Almost with a science fiction quality, the kelp has a hollow float that contains carbon monoxide – enough to kill a chicken so we were told.  Its finger-like projections can grow as long as sixty feet and part of the kelp’s life cycle has it breaking loose from its moorings at sea and washing ashore.

Doug is tutored on the musical secrets of the bull kelp

Crab moult

Interestingly, the bull kelp has a musical adaptation.  When approached correctly, the kelp does a mighty fine impression of a Vuvuzela, the plastic trumpet sported by fans at the soccer World Cup in South Africa.  

It does take a little practice to get the perfect pitch and produce the loud nasal whine the Vuvuzela is infamous for. The resulting drone could be heard above the waves.  We noticed that the beach now seemed absent of surfers - we suspect they had heard it all before and decided it was time to leave.

The ecosystem of the Pacific Rim is truly wondrous.