Monday, July 31, 2017

Pedder Bay Mini Vacation

Robyn and I were able to get away for a mini vacation at the Pedder Bay RV Resort and Marina over this past weekend prior to gearing up for the Victoria's Largest Little Airshow next weekend. Other than just taking it easy for once we planned to do a little birding, hiking, playing in our kayaks and try to catch some crabs. That's our way of taking things easy! LOL

Unfortunately the winds were averaging 20-35 kts around Race Rocks all weekend and it blew pretty hard in camp too but at least it was sunny and warm. Although we didn't get to do as much kayaking as we wanted to we did manage to set our crab trap a couple of days.

Robyn in her Wilderness Systems 155 Zephyr loving the sun.

Our Friday set produced good results with 2 very large female dungeness which were released but we also had a large male that became our dinner that night. Yum!!

Let's just say that we are getting pretty good at catching crabs from a kayak.

Our Saturday set wasn't as successful with only a couple of small red rock crabs which managed to scamper out of the trap on their own. It's not uncommon to see at least 50 traps set in Pedder Bay during the busy summer months which probably depletes the fishery too.

Birding wasn't as good as we hoped for due to the high winds but we did catch glimpses of the usual suspects such as American Goldfinches, House Finches, Chestnut-Backed Chickadees, Orange-Crowned Warblers and Spotted Towhees. While hiking one morning we tried to stealth our way closer to a couple of Belted Kingfishers but they reacted to the slightest movement or noise and flew away before I could get a good picture.

While kayaking we did come across a very friendly Pigeon Guillemot that followed close by for a short period of time. Although I didn't have my good DSLR Canon camera our Fuji XP's captured a few good shots for identification purposes.

A Pigeon Guillemot with its bright red legs 

Sitting around camp on Saturday afternoon a couple approached us asking if we were Mark & Robyn (Oh Oh! LOL) and although they looked familiar I couldn't put names to their faces. It turns out that they were Duncan and Joan Barwise who are fellow kayakers based sometimes in Maple Bay, BC and sometimes in Scotland and blog about their adventures at Oceanpax. We have been following each other on social media for the past several years but up until this day we had never met in person. It turns out that they were scouting kayak launch locations around Victoria and knew we were at Pedder Bay because of one of my Facebook posts so they stopped by to see us. Nice!! It was great to meet them in person and share stories and if your want to read about some fabulous kayaking experiences in Scotland you have to check out their blog!

On Sunday we actually did relax spending most of the time around camp reading, composing this blog post, walking to the marina for ice cream and watching the latest episode of Big Brother. Yes we lead a hectic lifestyle! LOL



Distance: 6.86 nm (12.70 km) -3 crab sets

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