Storm-watching in luxury?
Not sure how I feel about this one. Storm-watching season is one of the latest marketing creations for tourists visiting B.C. The trips offer views of the violence of nature on the Pacific Coast from the comfort and luxury of a coastal resort. There’s got to be a more adventurous approach to this out there somewhere. Maybe surfing the storm? Imagine the windsurfing. Lightning could be a problem though. Can you surf in head to toe rubber? Anyhow, here’s an excerpt from a story on the perfect storm-watching vacation:
Below the howl of the wind, from beyond the lighthouse, I could hear a deep, forlorn moan. I imagined a lone mournful sea-beast out on the rocks; it was, in fact, a whistling buoy. This rock-strewn, hurricane-battered stretch of ocean has seen hundreds of shipwrecks and is known as “the graveyard of the Pacific”.
The stormy evening sky had turned purple. The sea, where it wasn’t boiling and topped with ragged foam, was grey, the vast stretch of sand beige. But between the waves were clusters of baffling black stick figures – LS Lowry meets the west coast. And not far from them were other clusters of horizontal black shapes.“Surfers and sea lions,” said the waiter in the Wick’s Pointe restaurant that evening. “The sea lions aren’t always there but you can pretty much rely on the surfers. Once our chef was out there surfing and was just waiting for a wave when a grey whale surfaced right next to him.”