On the last day in Prince Rupert, we went on a bear watching tour. I jokingly call it a bear hunt after an old camp song, but anytime I hunt, it’s with my camera. We loaded into boats and headed up for a seven-hour cruise of the inlets and sounds of the Pacific Ocean, eventually heading to a bear habitat preserve called Khutzeymatten Park. The wind was brisk, but the water was relatively smooth, and we had an interesting view as we made our way around the points and the islands of the sound.

We hadn’t yet reached the bear habitat when we found our first grizzly bear. He was known to the guides as Scout. He was an older bear who had broken a leg a number of years ago and was still limping. However, he was fully capable of hunting and swimming, and while he was not rotund, it was early spring and the bears had just started putting their weight back on, so I didn’t think he looked too bad. We followed him for quite a distance, and finally caught him swimming from one part of the shore to another. At that point, we left him and went further into the inlet to capture more animals. This is specifically a grizzly bear habitat.  Sometimes known as brown bear, the grizzlies have a distinctive hump on the back, right at the neck. Some black bears have the coloring of the grizzly, but not hump. 

I had my long lens on my camera and was using my tripod as a monopod. With the rocking motion of the boat, it was sometimes a challenge to get a completely focused shot. I also had a lens that only went out to 600 mm. The tour boat owner was the ship captain, and he had a great telephoto lens that was double mine. The pictures below are his that he willingly shared with us. He could use a full tripod and the clarity of his pictures show it.

A keen lookout caused us to catch a lot of black rocks that looked like bears, brown stumps that looked like bears, and then occasionally, a brown stump that turned out to be a bear! 

I was hoping to catch a bear with a fish in its mouth. The bears were trying to cooperate, but mostly they munched on grass, which is their spring feed before the salmon start coming in late June and July. That’s when the bears begin piling on their weight for hibernation. One mom and her cub were adorable as she tried to show him or her the way to move around the shore.

On our way back, we ran into some sea otters. There were several, perhaps 10 or so, playing in and around the shore. We didn’t get too close to them for fear of scaring them off, but I did manage to catch a couple of really good pictures. 

The coolest thing I’ve seen on this trip so far was a bald eagle feeding frenzy in the bay as we returned home from the bear trip. It is hard to describe how it feels to be standing on the front of a boat with eagles diving for fish all around you. Some were at times flying directly at you, and then they started dive bombing just to the right or left of you as they saw something they wanted in the water. There were at least 15 to 20 bald eagles out there. A couple of them were young birds that still hadn’t developed their white heads. I wish I had taken a video instead of trying to capture pictures, but the collage below shows at least some of the energy and excitement that I saw. The photo below captures what it felt like to be standing on the deck with Eagles flying fast and furious around you.

The collage below are the actual photos that I was able to take.

It was a fabulous tour that I will remember for a very long time.