The Scientist: Port Alberni

A few weeks ago, we drove down to the west coast and headed out to Port Alberni on Vancouver Island. Here are some of the pictures we took.

We took the ferry from Tsawwassen to Duke Point in Nanaimo right around sunset. Garrett and I went up on deck to watch the sun go down over the ocean. First of all, we were able to look back behind us to Mount Baker in the distance:

And this is looking forward towards Vancouver and Point Grey:

This is looking out west towards Vancouver Island.

Here I wait, while Garrett takes his pictures of the ocean.

The sun starts to set:

And some cool tide lines show up:

More sunset:

Vancouver Island:

We arrived at my grandparent's house quite late that night, and promptly went to bed. The next day, we went for a stroll out at Stamp Falls Provincial Park, just past Port Alberni.

Here are the falls, with the fish ladder on the right side of the falls.

There's my bro:

Looking past the falls, down the river:

And looking back towards the falls from farther down the trail:

Once we reached the end of the civilized trail, a few of us climbed onward to see how far we could go. We got down to where the river opened wide up and saw some of the sockeye salmon splashing around as they headed upstream. It's pretty hard to get pictures of this, but I think Garrett did a fine job. If you look carefully, you can see the salmon:

With all those fish around, it didn't take long for the eagles to catch on. They were up in the top of a nearby tree. At first there was just one, then another one landed, followed by a third that was circling in the air:

We headed back after that, since we had some other stuff to do, but Garrett took this nifty little photo on the way back to the car. I really like it:

After visiting and whatnot, we found out that the Tall Ships Festival was ongoing that weekend in Port Alberni, and promptly convinced my uncle Derrick to take us out in his boat the following morning to see the ships set sail. We arrived in the harbour a little early, so we drove around and snapped some pictures while the ships were still docked.

There was a cool catamaran in harbour too. Apparently it was worth about 3 million dollars. Nice.

This is the Bounty, upon which most of the deck scenes in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies were filmed. She's a big girl:

Here's the boat crew! Garrett and Kyle:

Kim, Dad and Uncle Derrick:

I'm a sailor!

Soon, the ships launched, but to our disappointment, they didn't put up their sails. Instead, they powered out on their diesel engines.

On our trip back to the ferry in Nanaimo, we stopped at Cathedral Grove, which is an old growth forest on the side of the highway. Some of the trees are 600 years old! We walked through the short trail to see some of the trees. Here's Dad and Amanda: