Lagoon Paradise
It is 5:45 in the evening and we are four hours from our final destination, a return to 'civilization' at Sandspit (the Island's airport is located there) where our guests will be disembarking tomorrow morning.

It is again a brilliantly sunny day without a cloud in the sky. We rose early again this morning to visit a true lagoon near our anchoring site. 

This lagoon was like a glistening diamond jewel encased in a forest, with a small outlet at the mouth of the lagoon where water rushes in at high tide, then slowly seeps out over a waterfall at all other times of the day. It was an absolute paradise, with mountains framed in the mouth of it, a tine island in the centre and a cornucopia of life right inside of it. I spent a solid hour photographing the bat stars, leather stars, ochre stars, rose stars, giant musses, butter clams, fucus (rockweed), sea lettuce, redrock crabs, sea urchins and so on and so on. It was like a miniature Burnaby Narrows and it was incredible.

I could have easily stayed there all day long, but we had one final stop to make on our trip before we headed for 'home';  Windy Bay - a site of towering trees on Lyell Island close to where the logging was stopped and where history was made.

Towering trees of Windy Bay
We dropped the hook in Windy Bay at 11 a.m. and spent two hours exploring the ancient old growth forests for which it is famed. One giant tree, a Sitka spruce measuring more than twenty metres in circumference, was so big that it took eleven of us to wrap around it with their arms outstretched.

I thought the whole site had a gentleness and a pleasant beauty to it. It was hard to imagine the emotions that must have been running through the area fourteen years ago when the Haida were encamped nearby. As we left Windy Bay and started back towards Queen Charlotte City, we could clearly see the clear cuts that came within a kilometre of the ancient spruce and cedar.

Farewell to mountains, myths & memories
We are now heading north, leaving Gwaii Haanas astern as I write this. It is a fitting farewell to a part that will now always have a special place in my heart--the sun is shining on the mountains, the water is sparking and our guests are lying out on the deck basking in the glow of Haida Gwaii, more recently named the Queen Charlotte Islands.

It is now time for me to go, to wrap up this part of my trip. As I said before, the sun is shining, the water is glistening, the mountain peaks are shimmering--it's time for me to get back to the deck to bid my own farewell to the mountains, myths, and now, memories that make up Gwaii Haanas - The Shining Wonder.

Howa.