Another early start this morning and after having our trip cancelled yesterday we were glad to get on the boat for our whale watching trip with Prince of Whales 
(yes, that really is what the tour company is called).
It takes about 2 hours to get from Downtown Vancouver to the straight between the mainland and Vancouver Island 
. There are hundreds of small islands in the strait which host a variety of wildlife including seals and eagles so we spent a while sailing around between them and taking a few snaps.
The captain of the boat had been on the radio to the other tour boats and they’d located a pod of about 80 Orca whales (although that would have been made up of many smaller groups of 4 or 5 whales), so we headed south into more open water to see them.
Seeing whales in the wild is incredibly impressive, but they don’t like having their photo taken. They spend most of their time underwater, coming up briefly every couple of minutes for air and the boats aren’t allowed within 200ft of them, so getting photos is hard. Having said that, at one point the whales decided to swim towards us and the only thing the captain can do when that happens is switch off the engine and wait for them to pass by. At this point a couple of whales surfaced about 50ft from the boat and then swam right underneath us which was hugely exciting.
After seeing the whales the boat carried on to Vancouver Island and docked at Victoria which is the capital of British Columbia. Victoria is a lovely place and we could have spent more time there than the hour we had, but the trip included a drive to Buchart Gardens , about 40 minutes drive from the capital, so we left after lunch.
I’m not the biggest fan of horticulture, but the gardens were very impressive and probably the most relaxing thing we’ve done in the last 3 weeks. It also gave me a chance to practice my photography on something that wasn’t moving.
Our day ended with the boat picking us up from a small cove next to the gardens and a 2 hour ride back to Vancouver. We weren’t the only ones on the boat that wanted to sleep on the way back. The Seattle/Whistler/Vancouver area is another area I’d like to revisit in the future, you can’t move for amazing scenery and there’s so much to do we could easily fill another 2 weeks here.