The Life Aquatic - Canuck Chronicles Day 16

7/30

First day without volunteers at the University of Victory Whale Lab in….two weeks exactly. It’s a surreal kind of feeling having the house so empty after it was practically alive for so long (seriously, the house moves…sways more like it). It was sad seeing them leave, since we had one group of five people who were here for the first two weeks and got pretty close with the staff. There’s one in particular that I’ll especially miss, but that’s the way it is. Tyler said it from the beginning: you learn a lot about a person when you live with them for a week, but as quickly as they grow on you, they leave again. It’s just the way things work in the eco-tourism business I suppose.

That said it was a pretty colossal last day for our campers, and a great morning for the staff and especially me. As soon as I walked out squinting into the foggy sunshine, I saw the whole group of volunteers heading down the peer, whispering frantically and waving me over, saying they had seen a river otter in the middle of the inlet. Just as a reminder, my research project down here is a study of river otter behavior, and in two weeks I have seen little more than two otters, so it’s easy to believe me when I say I was a little excited. Not only was this particular otter not so cleverly evasive as the others I’ve stumbled upon, but it put on a straight-up show for our volunteers. It dove down and came up a few seconds later with a fish and then swam with it right at us, under the pier and across to the other side, where it feasted on its breakfast under a floating wharf on the shore-side of the pier. It started playing peek-a-boo with us for a while from under that wharf, poking its head out of various cracks and gaps until we realized that unless the otter could move at lightning fast speed and pop its head out of two different places at once, there was actually MORE than one otter under that wharf. They didn’t play with us for very long and soon swam out to the central dock where they didn’t come out from under until they were out of range of us. I found it very interesting timing that I’ve been searching for river otters tirelessly for the last two weeks, and the day that our second batch of volunteers gears to leave, Two decide to pop out right from under my nose. I’m pretty sure they’re toying with me, but there’s no way of proving it.

The staff decided that our little furry entertainer shouldn’t be the only one who had a big breakfast, and we made ourselves a rancher-size breakfast (after the last of the volunteers were gone). I have to say we’ve been living a pretty impressive vegetarian lifestyle on account of it tends to be cheaper when buying in bulk for an average of 22 people, not to mention that half of our first week of volunteers were vegetarian. So needless to say, meat’s become something of a delicacy in the old house. But this morning we threw that little conservation rule right out the window when our head-researcher William pulled out his five POUND secret stash of bacon as well as leftover bratwurst. He cooked up all the meat and a giant brick of hash browns, after which I contributed some of my famous omelets (which I DID perfect in Scotland), and with a side of smoked salmon on top of all that, we ate until we couldn’t eat any more (which in my case took a loooong time).

We spent a good amount of time discussing plans for next week after we were all content with our food intake, which was very necessary as next week is Teen Week, and anybody who’s ever been a teenager at camp can imagine what kind of storm we have ahead of us. But the staff is doing a great job of taking advantage of the four-day calm before it. We worked the rest of the day on cleaning up the house, doing bulk laundry and taking inventory of all the food we have left in the house. I had some batteries that needed charging and data that needed organizing, so it became a simple but productive afternoon. And when that even started to slow down, I realized I had a camera in the field that I had to check, so I begged a couple of the staff to hit the 5pm mosquito-ridden water with me in the kayaks. And I’m glad they did, because I retrieved my first video feed that actually had an otter visible on it, albeit a thirty second video of its rear and tail before it disappeared. It was still more than I expected to see and was another nice reminder that maybe I could be possible almost close to doing something correct out here. Don’t worry, I won’t let it go to my head.

We had leftovers for dinner and had a lovely evening of sharing an unclaimed bottle of Jack Daniels and watching The Life Aquatic. I’d only ever seen the beginning of it when it first came out and I didn’t really get the humor at the time. But now after getting the full dose of it after spending nearly three weeks in an aquatic environment, I think I can safely say that it’s become one of my favorite movies (though that could slightly be the booze talking).

Smooth sailing, good hunting, and always get your boots wet.