Clayoquot Sound: Kayak Hunting for Black Bears

I managed to shoot a small spike buck on the first day of rifle deer season back in September, and that helped shore up the meat supply until spring bear season, which started a month ago. I chose to only get one bear last year; I still had bear left over from the season before, at the time. I figured I could stretch it out until now, and I just managed to do so. So with my spike buck eaten, and last year's bear meat down to the last 5 lbs., I started to plan this year's bear hunt. I wanted to go somewhere new this year; I've shot three bears in the same place over the last two seasons, and I like to spread out my harvest to different populations. I wanted to go somewhere that had a fairly significant barrier to access, to limit the amount of people I'd run into, and ensure a less-pressured bear population. Looking at maps of Vancouver Island, I decided on the northern portion of Clayoquot Sound, which is accessible only by boat or float plane. Looking at Google Earth, and doing some other desk scouting, I could see that there were plenty of grassy beaches and lush-looking estuaries that would likely attract some nice bears. On April 24th, I packed the car, loaded the kayak on top, and drove toward Tofino to find a good place to put in and start exploring.

Arriving in Tofino later in the day, I decided to wait until the next morning to start paddling, and I checked out Pacific Rim National Park in the meantime. I drove down Grice Bay Rd., and found a rough trail that I figured would lead out to the ocean. I took a walk down this trail, and found an eerie number of dead, decomposing birds and animals. Every 25 yards there seemed to be a new skeleton or stinky carcass rotting on the ground. I turned around after a little while, and decided that I'd check out the town of Tofino instead. It turned out that Tofino wasn't much more alluring than the stinky animal trail, but they did have two gas stations that were open late, which I appreciated. I bought a four-day National Park parking pass from the dispenser at Long Beach, ate a delicious Mountain House meal (beef stew), and slept in the car at the head of the creepy dead animal trail.

In the morning, I ate Mountain House breakast (beef stew again), went to the boat launch at the end of Grice Bay Rd., put the kayak in the water, loaded it full of gear, and set off to explore Clayoquot Sound. I passed Indian Island, and crossed Fortune Channel over to Meares Island, where I followed the shoreline north, checking things out. I tried for quite a while to get decent pictures of seals and dolphin/porpoise pods that would go past me. I ended up with one clear seal picture, and a video of a porpoise/dolphin that might as well have been early 1900s moving picture evidence of the Loch Ness monster. Upon reaching the mouth of Mosquito Harbour on Meares Island, I went back across Fortune Channel, and hauled out on a little spit to have a Mountain House lunch (beef stew again). At this point, it was sunny and pleasant out, and I was on a pretty inaccessible little piece of land 10km from where I started, with just my seal and sea lion friends around. I felt like my chest was opening up and my heart was shooting warm light out of it, like in the Care Bears. It was good.

As great as I was feeling, I still needed to find a few nice beaches to cruise past and glass for bears. I packed up, and continued northward, where I had my first bear sighting of the trip. I was paddling past a point, when I spotted what looked like the dark bottom of a large log laying on the beach. Upon further inspection with my binos, it was actually a large black bear. I reversed course in the kayak, and went back past the small point I had come around. Faced with two choices of approach, I proceeded to make the wrong choice, which I knew was the wrong choice, but I made it anyway. Instead of paddling in a big semicircle down to the far end of beach, landing the kayak, and approaching from straight downwind, I did the dumb thing. I landed the kayak right where I was, and opted to take a land route that was much shorter, had better shooting lanes, and more advantageous cover. However, the wind was much more precarious from this direction, past the bear by just 45 degrees or so. Suffice it to say, I got to within 10 yards of where I had envisioned setting up for the shot, the wind shifted, the bear's nose went up, he looked right in my direction, and he was gone. I should have gone the long way with the crappier cover, and the more favorable wind.

Now that I had my traditional blown stalk out of the way, I could concentrate on getting serious and actually using a modicum of hunting sense to try to shoot an animal. It was now getting into the prime hours of the evening, when bears start to come out of the woodwork. I paddled further north into the Sound, and soon I spotted a dark blotch on a wide beach from literally over a kilometre away. I put up my binos for confirmation, and sure enough, it was a bear. I had plenty of time to plan this stalk, as I had lots of water to cover, and I could see the bear all the way in while I paddled toward the beach. I landed the kayak about 500 yards down from the animal, in as inconspicuous a location as I could manage, but I was still in view of the bear. The tide was coming in, and there was no place to drag the kayak to in order to keep it above the high tide line, so I would have to hustle to avoid getting stranded. This time around, I did the right thing, and approached from the long way, with not a lot of great shooting positions, but with the wind right in my face. I tried my best to stay toward the back side of the beach, close to the tree line, but it ended up not mattering too much, as the bear was focused on grass the whole time, and was actually feeding toward me, conveniently closing distance. There was a perfectly placed, massive upturned stump with a lot of the root system still attached, between me and the bear. I used this as cover against my movements as I got to within 75 yards and set up for the shot. As if on cue, as soon as I knelt down to get a look through the scope, the bear started to emerge from behind the stump, and as soon as I had a good broadside chest shot, I took it. As soon as I could verify the animal was dead, I left my gun, lifevest, and binos, and jogged back to where I had left the kayak, and found that it was in just about enough water to start freely floating. I got in, and paddled as close as I could to the kill site.

I enjoyed a leisurely time field dressing, having a couple of hours to go before sundown. The boar was pretty big, and extremely fat. I hung the bagged quarters off of the upturned stump that I had used as cover for my approach. Once I finished that job, I test-loaded everything into the kayak to see if I would be able to get the meat and my camp stuff back to the boat launch at Grice Bay in one trip in the morning. I took the boat out for a little spin to see how it felt with all the extra weight, especially all the extra weight high up, from the stuff I had to tie on top of the deck. It was pretty tippy, and rode really low in the water, but I figured I had all day the next day to take it slow, and chug home. After the test-paddle, I set up camp right on the beach near where I shot the bear, and had a Mountain House dinner (interestingly named "macaroni and cheese product"). I had the meat hung up far enough away that it was pretty safe, and I kept my food stowed away in the kayak, but even still, I figured I would get some curious visitors in the night. Usually when you're way back in the woods where people don't usually go, you get a higher number of critters coming around in the middle of the night. To try to discourage this, I built a big fire close to my tent, and kept it fed for the first few hours of the night. When I finally did go to sleep, I was fully expecting at least some weasels and mice trying to get into the tent at night. Nothing came, though. Not until morning. I woke up and made some Mountain House (pasta primavera; possibly the best variety of the trip), sat on a log looking out at the ocean, and contemplated the long, slow paddle back. Then a bear came through the bushes, 10 yards away, and alarmed both of us just a little. When he realized there was a person around, he backed off, and I retrieved my .30-06 from the kayak, and made sure the critter stayed gone while I finished my breakfast and got packed up.

It was a wobbly, tippy, slow slog in the kayak back to where I'd come from. The weight was distributed all unevenly, so the boat tracked poorly the whole way back, and I had to make corrective strokes constantly. What should have been about a three-and-a-half-hour paddle ended up taking about five hours. There was a pretty wicked headwind coming in, just to slow things down to even more of a crawl. And I was battling the current through the narrow passages between and around the islands. At one point, the wind was really bad, and the waves got to the point where it was becoming dangerous, so I beached the boat on Meares Island and had another Mountain House meal (pasta primavera again). I waited, hoping the wind and waves would die down to the point that I could jump back in the boat, and make a last dash the rest of the way in from there. Eventually I saw less and less white on the tops of the waves, so i decided to go for it. I was so happy to paddle in to the boat launch at the end of the day and get the lifevest off, and start loading the car. After a long drive, with a short stop in Port Alberni for some fresh ice for the cooler, I was back home, and the butchering started. I eventually got all the meat cut up and packaged for the freezer at about a half-past midnight. It's a very satisfying feeling when you get home from a hard, successful trip, spend several more hours processing meat, and then you get to finally lay down and reflect on the adventure and the accomplishment. The freezer's not empty anymore. My caveman instincts will let me rest momentarily. I think it was about ten hours of rest, and I wished I was right back out there again, tangling with bears, getting barked at by seals, and eating 'House in the shadow of mountains.