It was the 6th of July and the mission for the morning was to see bears. So we cast off our lines at Tenakee Springs and headed up Tenakee Inlet. There are several side bays along this large inlet – Crab Bay, Seal Bay, Long Bay, each with meadows and streams that attract brown bear. The salmon had not quite started to move into these streams, as it was bit early in the season, but they were present around the bay and the local seiners were hoping to cash in. We hoped the bears would be around as well, congregating at the streams feeding on the lush grasses and waiting in anticipation of their coming feast on spawning salmon.
It was a surprise when my dad spotted our first bear. We were just starting into the bay and still a mile from the tideflats where we expected to find bears. As everyone grabbed binoculars we steered towards shore to get a better look.
So often a bear will run for the woods when a large white object appears. This bear just kept eating grass. A further surprise… as we got closer, a small bear cub appeared at its mother’s side. Deep water just off the rocky shore allowed us to get the boat in quite close. On occasion the mother would look up at us as we drifted nearby with our cameras clicking away. The array of pointing humans, binoculars and cameras were dismissed as unimportant as she continued to graze hungerly along the shore.
The cub was a handsome little fellow – dark, with a collar of golden fur. He stayed close to mother, but stared at us curiously. We may have been the first humans he had ever seen. He watched us intently from the safety of mother’s side.
There were several other bears on the grassy flats at the end of the bay. But the shallow water kept us from getting anywhere near with the boat. The total was nine bears that morning, including four cubs, three with the same mother. With the morning’s objective a success, we headed back to Tenakee to collect our crab pots and head across Chatham Strait to Funter Bay.
A word of caution when exploring the upper reaches of Tenakee Inlet. We found that the locations of both rocks awash and submerged were poorly charted.
A mother and cub grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis) along the shoreline of Long Bay, photo by Andrew Cooper
