Cottage At The Cove

TESTIMONIALS

Hello,

We have spent many very happy weeks with Jim and Mary in Telegraph Cove. Their beautiful new house already feels like a second home to us. They are brilliant hosts and Mary's meals are legendary on the North Island. The views from the sitting room are breathtaking and you don't have to leave it to begin the wildlife watching adventure.

 Trips on the Gikumi never fail to thrill as Jim has the knowledge and knack to always be in the right place at the right time to see any wild life in the area, be it orca, humpbacks, sea lions, dolphins or the wonderful birds. We have learnt so much about the area from him. The Gikumi is comfortable and spacious. The changes over the years have only added to its charm.

We are not the only people to be captivated. We have made many good friends, from all over the world, who can't resist the urge to keep coming back year after year, and we can't wait to see them all again in 2012.

 We hope that Orcella Expeditions becomes as successful as Stubbs Island has been. You certainly deserve to for all the hard work and love that you are investing in it. We are proud to count Jim and Mary as close friends.

Pat and Bill Haley, England

View videos of previous eco-tours

Mike Mockler
... wildlife tour leader, safari guide, photographer, author, lecturer ... Canada - Vancouver & Vancouver Island, September 2011 (new window will open)

Hi Mary and Jim,  how nice to hear from you.
 
Bev and I have only been home a few days and have only just got over the “jet lag”.  Bev brought a Canadian cold home with her and hasn’t felt at all good for a few days.  However, she seems to be getting over it now and with luck will shortly be back to her normal self.
 
It is difficult to find words to describe just how much we enjoyed our trip with you. We were perhaps a little lucky with the weather, although fog and the resulting poor light did make photography a little bit hit and miss, particularly as whales do not yet seem to have cottoned on to the idea that we need them to stay in the air for longer periods when we cannot use fast shutter speeds.  Perhaps they will learn. They certainly seemed to be very interested in all we were doing and were keen to watch us watching them watching us. Jim seemed to have a remarkable understanding of the wildlife and he seemed to know exactly where the wildlife would be at any time. It was uncanny the way the whales seemed to be well aware when most of the other boats had gone and we were the last boat left, at which point they began to perform and approach the boat in a way that they had not done earlier. It was almost as if they knew that we were not permitted to approach them and, therefore, they took steps to rectify that situation themselves. One became so engrossed in watching what the animals were doing  that cameras got forgotten. I am sure we all missed some really remarkable photographs as a result. A truly wonderful, wonderful wildlife experience.
 
However, it was not just the wildlife that made our trip so very outstanding. The welcome we received from you both was so warm and friendly, Mary’s food was superb and, although we had only just met you, we were made to feel that we were old friends who had known each other all our lives and we really appreciated being able to share you boat with you.
 
I am including some photos for you to look through.  They are the result of a quick run through of what we have. They have been reduced in size to make them a little quicker to send over the internet and none have been photoshop-ed..  If there are any that you would like to see at full resolution just e-mail me back.  We are very happy for you to use any of them for your own purposes, but even though we are in not professionals, we would be grateful if you did not pass them on to others and, of course, the copyright remains with Bev who hopes we might find some good enough to enter into an amateur competition or two. The video has had to take second place for a while. Seven hours of tape takes seven hours to transfer to the computer and then two or three times as long again to search through it all to find which are the bits worth using. Much will be too wobbly.  Trying to hold a camera steady for long periods on a boat that is pitching, yawing and rolling, albeit only slowly, when you are looking through a viewfinder and not at the horizon is a technique I have not mastered yet. I would love to know how the BBC do it, although I suspect they are using some sort of gimballed device to hold the camera most of the time.
 
Two of the humpbacks have fish pouring off the heads, which may not show up so well on these smaller photos.  Also, two of the shots of airborne dolphins show it with a long piece of fishing line hanging from it. It is difficult to tell from the photo how the line is attached, but I don’t suppose anyone would ever be able to catch it to remove the line anyway. I thought we were looking at one young humpback playing around, but is obvious from the tails, there were at least two.  One has a rather large hole in his tail fluke and both appear to be very heavily scarred.
 
Each Photo should have a title as “alternative text” to identify it, but I have not got that to show on my copy here. Hopefully it will arrive with your version.
 
It was wonderful to meet you both, we really do hope that it will not be our last meeting. We would love to see you in the UK if you can make it over. Come and stay with us, or if you are short of time, we will arrange a meeting somewhere about the country if we can. Perhaps a day or two on a narrowboat on the canal system would make a change from  the marine environment.
 
All the very best to you both,

Nigel & Beverely Eaton – Gray, England

Hi,
 
Peggy and I returned last evening from our vacation to Vancouver and then to the North East coast of Vancouver Island.
 
We arrived in Vancouver a day early in anticipation of flight trouble with Hurricane Irene so we had more time to tour the city.  Vancouver is a large and diverse city with a multicultural population.  Vancouver is the third most expensive city in the world for housing.  Highlights of our stay in Vancouver were multiple visits to Stanley Park where there are beautiful gardens, an aquarium, geese, raccoons and miles and miles of hiking and biking trails.  We spent a lot of time in this magnificent area which is like Central Park in NY except less crowded.  We visited Capilano Suspension bridge where you walk over a deep chasm on a long moving and swinging suspension bridge.  We walked out on a glass walkway like the one in the Grand Canyon and also walked in a wooden walkway at the top of the forest.  We also visited a Chinese gardens and another major park called Queen Elizabeth Park.  Our hotel was right on the water near where the cruise ships arrive from and leaving for Alaska.  Vancouver is an interesting, expensive and varied major town with lots of art, culture, different food and languages.
 
On Sunday we flew to the north end of Vancouver Island and landed in Port Hardy and from there took a 45 minute taxi ride to Telegraph Cove right on the eastern coast of the north island.  The couple that owns the tour company had just completed two magnificent new homes right on the cliffs overlooking the bays and islands.  From the windows in the living room you can watch eagles and whales.  There were a total of 11 people on this trip and we were the only people who were doing the trip for the first time.  One couple was on their 11th trip, another couple was on their 8th visit to Orcella Expeditions.
 
The husband, Jim Borrowman has lived on the north island for over 35 years and has been a diver, ship’s captain and in involved in the preservation of marine wildlife, the local environment and the local whale interpretive center. The wife, Mary is the business manager and a gourmet cook.  The accommodations were all new and spectacular.  The food was superb and the service was excellent.
 
The magnificence of the scenery equals anything we have seen anywhere in the world including Alaska and the Canadian and US Rockies.
 
Each day started with breakfast at 7 AM and the boat left the dock at 8 AM.  With minutes each day we were photographing eagles, falcons, seals, and sea lions.  The whales are the stars of the trip.  On the first day we spotted 47 different Orca (Killer Whales).  The naturalist who was on the boat each day identifies each whale by a shape of the fins and coloring of the whale.  The Orcas travel in families and there are residents, transients and offshore varieties. We saw Orca’s breech (jump out of the water), tail slap the water, spy hole (come straight up out of the water and basically look around) and heard them scratching themselves via hydrophones on the rocks at several scratching beaches. We heard the sounds of whales calling each other and it was a moving and surrealistic experience.
 
The largest whales we saw and photographed where the humpbacks.  One humpback whale breeched 30 times in a row while we watched.  We saw two humpbacks breech at the same time.  Each whale is identified by color, shape and marking.  They are named separately and identified in matriarchal family lines.  Several times humpbacks appeared beside the boat and we actually were breathed on by whales as they exhaled and took there next breath.  The boat was 58 feet long and the humpbacks were as long as the boat and the orcas were probably 30 feet long.
 
One day an estimated 800 pacific dolphin swam up to around and in front of the boat.  They dove, flipped, and jumped as if on cue to perform.  We were among them for over 45 minutes.  The weather was clear, the seas calm and the views were impossible to describe.  We had one day of some light rain but the consensus was as rookies we saw the best displays of any trip the group had ever experienced with the best possible weather.
 
Most of the other travelers had huge lenses for their cameras and got pictures of vastly superior quality then ours.  One of the guests gave us a memory stick with 47 pictures.  I am going to attach a few pictures to this e-mail.
 
Once we get caught up on the piles of work I will upload all the pictures to Kodak Gallery and send you a link if you want to see more pictures.  I am also going to do a DVD of the best pictures with music.  This will take a while.
 
At the end of the trip we had a chance to name a new humpback that had not been seen in the area before.  I privately asked the naturalist who is the head of the whale identifying project if there was some way to identify this majestic creature in recognition of Jason. One of the pictures I am attaching is of the newest humpback named in the Canadian Northwest.  His name is Argonaut from the tale of Jason and the Argonauts.  If you look at the tail you can see a perfect “J”.  I am in tears as I write this.  I think Jason would have enjoyed being associated with a magnificent creature of the sea and he was always most happy near the ocean.
 
We have already reserved our 2013 trip back to Telegraph Cove.
 
Hope all is well with you and I will send more pictures and the DVD as soon as I can.
 
Cliff and Peggy Gionet, Florida

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