Sea Kayaking with dozens of sea lions at Pt Holmes near Courtenay, B.C.

by Keith and Heather Nicol

    On Thursday, March 8 we attended a dinner party and one of the hosts Guy Wassick mentioned that he had seen many rafts of sea lions off Pt Holmes that day while driving along Lazo Road. We had been out to that area earlier in the week looking for evidence of herring spawning and the buzz of wildlife activity that occurs with that but had seen nothing at Pt Holmes, Air Force Beach or Kye Bay.  So with this new information we headed out to checking things out on Friday morning and sure enough we could see many congregations of sea lions with their fins in the air and some groups were noisily barking. Curiously we saw no other activity that we knew was associated with herring spawning like gulls squawking and eagles swooping but it is always fun to see large groupings of sea lions so we headed back to the house to get our sea kayaks.  

Heather paddling slowly toward a group of sea lions

The water was flat calm and the boat launch at Pt Holmes made it easy to launch. We could see several rafts of sea lions just off shore so paddled off toward the closest grouping.  Sea lions use their flippers for thermoregulation and in this grouping we could see a mass of flippers, tails and heads. Biologists think they use the flippers to gather the sun’s energy and then this is heat is transferred to the rest of the animal below the water surface.  Sea lions are also known for their distinctive barking, a sound which carries a long distance across the water. It seems like once one sea lion starts barking it sends others into the barking mode as well.  Most of the sea lions we saw appeared to be California Sea Lions and the males have a distinctive “dome” on the forehead. 

 

Bring a camera with a telephoto lens - lets you see the mass of fins and heads up close

   We usually give these animals a wide berth since they do have a mouthful of sharp teeth but as far we can determine they never seem to attack kayakers. We would typically paddle within a 100 meters of so and then just sit and watch and often they would come closer. Sometimes they would surface close to us have a quick scan around and then noisy dive under the water. This isn’t too unnerving when they are in front of you but when you hear loud slapping and splashes behind you wonder what is going on. One sea lion seemed intent on sunning his head and swam quite close to us keeping its head above the water the whole time. Then another sea lion came up next to it and fortunately I had my camera out and got a picture of the 2 of them “kissing”. They stayed like that for a few moments before one sea lion let out a snarl and the other one quickly disappeared under the water.  We also saw some sea lions with herring in their mouth as they came to the surface. 

Two sea lions came face to face right in front of us

A paddle boarder also came out to investigate and he got very close to the sea lions. In fact at one point a large group seemed to swim right toward him but since it was 200-300 meters away we couldn’t see exactly how close they were.  Herring season is short lived but is well worth having a look at either from on shore, from a paddle board or from a small boat.  Click on the link to see a video of our outing-  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKZV-q2poPk

A paddleboarder cruises past some sea lions with Lasqueti Island behind