Wildcoast Adventures vs Spirit of the West Adventures

Wildcoast Adventures

If you like being outside but you do not want to pack away a wet tent or think about dinner, everything is done for you. You bring yourself, some clothes and a camera.

• Canvas tents on raised platforms, strung through the trees on boardwalks, each one tucked into a gap rather than a clearing.
• It is still canvas, the nights are still cool and the bathroom is still shared. But you can paddle for six hours, get properly cold, sit in a wood-fired tub until you are properly warm, eat a plated dinner, and be ready at seven the next morning.
• Parking at the Campbell River dock is free, check-in at the office took about four minutes, and there was coffee at the briefing. We left in sunshine on a flat sea.
• Nobody arrives knowing how to do this. That is the design and not a concession: eighteen guests at most, and a guide always within talking distance.
• I saw sea lions and a humpback from the water taxi, and no orca, and it mattered less than I expected.

Spirit of the West Adventures

Base camps are established sites where you day-paddle out and return each evening. Expeditions keep faith with the older tradition: everything in the hatches, camp moving daily, routes through the Broughton Archipelago, Desolation Sound, Nuchatlitz and an eight-day line through the Great Bear Rainforest.

• Walk-in safari tents with real beds, a cook shelter producing food that has no business coming off a camp stove, and, at the flagship camp, a cedar hot tub at the water edge facing the channel the whales use.
• Yes, whales have surfaced mid-soak. It is the detail everybody repeats afterwards and the one that most reliably ruins ordinary camping for the people it happens to.
• The guides plan for it: the first day is deliberately gentle and the briefing assumes nothing.
• Guides here obey approach-distance rules with religious care, which produces the correct relationship. The whales run the encounter and you are grateful.
• Trips run late June to late September and the whale weeks go first. Rain is not a cancellation criterion.