Our island was so beautiful this morning. There were sun rays coming through the clouds and the tide was creeping it’s way up the rocks.

We planned to paddle to Walters Cove to stay at the small town of Kyuquot. We had perfect paddling conditions once again, with the beautiful coast on our left and lots of islands to our right it almost felt like the east coast back home in NZ.

I could see a huge pile of kelp up ahead, I was about to tell Ngaio to avoid paddling through the middle of it when the kelp started swimming away! It was otters which had rafted together and there were so many they looked like kelp. We’ve been told it’s rare to see otters when they make a raft, and that it’s usually a group of adolescent males hanging out together. It was the third time we had seen a ‘raft’ but we had never seen this many!

We stopped paddling and just watched them swim and duck under the water, some brave ones came over to check us out. Once they were bored with us we paddled on , headed between the islands to find Walters Cove. We pulled up at a dock and I chatted to a group of locals to find out if there was somewhere to stay. We got shown where to go and we paddled to the other side of the bay to check into a cute little hostel room.

We put on a load of washing and headed straight to the store to get essentials (noodles, a cucumber, corn chips and salsa). The talk of the town was the big storm that was heading in tomorrow, I hadn’t heard of a big storm!? It was lucky we stopped here, I got all the weather updates and we made a new plan.

It’s frustrating knowing there’s another storm on the way as we had planned to put in some big days paddling. We can’t be too frustrated, we knew the weather on the west coast would be like this and we knew we would be ruled by nature and the weather.

It’s awesome to be able to be safe in a protected harbour with some nice company, could be worse!

See below for our days paddling and tonights camp site.

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GPS Tracker Tips - If you are following Brando & Ngaio on their TRACKME GPS tracker, here's a tip; Once you follow the link, click on the 'Brando & Ngaio' location icon and select 'path'

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(first image and blog via satellite phone)

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