It’s raining this morning, but the wind has subsided. When the rain turned to sprinkles I decided to go for a paddle. Secret Cove, which is just around the point is on the open ocean. Since there wasn’t any wind to speak of, I decided to venture outside to check out Secret Cove.

I could feel the liveliness of the water, which made me a little nervous, as soon as I reached the fairway. I hadn’t checked the tide tables, but thought that the tide was coming in. However, when I stopped paddling, the current was taking me out to sea. I saw some seals on a rock and wanted to get a shot of them, but the water was bouncing me around too much to focus.

By this time it felt like the current had increased, taking me out to sea at a pretty fast clip. Am I caught in a riptide? I turned around and paddled harder. The current wasn’t nearly as strong as the one I experienced at Wallace Bight, but strong enough to make me nervous.  Luckily I didn’t have far to paddle before I was out of the current and back in the safety of Welcome Harbour.

These shores must see ferocious winds in the winter. The trees look absolutely tortured.

Coming in to this area is very daunting because of all the rocks hiding just beneath the surface, unless you happen to arrive at a lower low tide. It’s a piece of cake with GPS and electronic charts, but if your computer crashed you would be in a world of hurt.

I thought that there would be lots of wildlife here. But, I paddled and paddled and never found anything until I was almost back to the boat, when I spotted this eagle in one of those tortured trees.

A pair of Kingfishers visited the boat off and on all day. They’d sit on our rail, looking for fish. Kingfishers must have incredible eyes, because the fish they’re after are teeny weeny. They apparently don’t like the heads, so they left the teeny weeny heads on the deck for us to dispose of.