Berry Island Lodge vs Knight Inlet Lodge

Berry Island Lodge

The lodge's own line on wildlife is the honest one: the guides seek animals in their natural habitat, from small boats and on foot, and that is less predictable than a viewing platform.

• You reach it by water taxi from Alder Bay, half an hour through Johnstone Strait and Blackfish Sound, and the first thing you see is the deck.
• Full-day bear viewing in the inlets and estuaries, by boat, by zodiac or on foot depending on the tide. Marine tours for orca, humpbacks, Pacific white-sided dolphins, Dall's porpoises and Steller sea lions in the water around the island.
• Eight along the boardwalk, four on the float. Each has an ocean view, an ensuite with a shower, a gas fireplace and two beds; the bed frames were made from Vancouver Island fir by a local carpenter.
• I spent most of my days on the point photographing the lodge itself, and still came home with dolphins, sea lions, seals and eagles from the water around it.
• The boats go out and come back by 4:30, and what happens next is the lodge's oldest tradition. At five, whoever is willing walks down to the dock and jumps in.

Knight Inlet Lodge

You are not looking for bears; you are waiting in the one place the bears have to come.

• The commute is a floatplane with a camera bag between your feet, half an hour of threading between islands before the machine banks into the cove.
• Spring and summer are boat months: grizzlies grazing the estuary sedge, newborn cubs, humpbacks and Steller sea lions working the outer water. Then the salmon clock strikes, and everything moves to the stands.
• They fish below and around you, close enough that a 100 to 400mm covers everything, and because you arrived before they did and will leave after, nothing about your presence changes what they do.
• The rooms have proper ensuites and the kind of beds you do not expect on a floating structure. Two queens, timber headboards, and the inlet outside the window doing what a television would be doing anywhere else.
• Three-night packages are the standard unit, rates are quoted on enquiry, and children under six cannot come in summer or under eight in autumn. The floatplane is spectacular and weather-dependent in equal measure, and a slow morning happens.