Day 3: Running salmon?!

On Sunday morning we were up early hoping to see the beginnings of a beautiful sunrise.  Unfortunately, when I woke up at 6:30 and looked outside, I could see the sky was completely overcast.  Clearly, there'd be no sunrise photography this morning.

After a pleasant breakfast at the Green Bay Lodge we made our way to Kagawong.  Kagawong had several places we wished to visit: Old Mill, Pioneer Post Office, Lighthouse, Church, and several other historic buildings.  Having said that, by a large margin the highlight of the excursion to Kagawong was Bridal Veil Falls.  This awesome waterfall is situated on the outskirts of the village.  The drop in the waterfall is several meters, so we were able to get some great long exposure shots.  Little did we know that we would also be treated to the tail end of this year's salmon run!  Salmon were still working their way upriver and were congregating and spawning at the base of the falls.  Having never seen a salmon run before, this was certainly a great experience.  It was interesting to see the instinctive drive that salmon have to swim upriver and spawn.  Clearly, survival of the fittest was in the works as there was quite a number of fish that obviously had not made it all the way to the base of the falls.  Their corpses littered the river and surrounding shoreline.

Next up, we drove to Misery Bay and did a 7-8 km hike along the eastern side of the bay.  The hike itself was quite easy and we were treated with many photographic opportunities, including very surreal rock formations called alvar.  The specific type of alvar we got a chance to see is only found in two places in the world; Manitoulin Island and the northern shores of the Baltic Sea (Sweden & Estonia).

We finished the day's travels with a visit to Gore Bay.  For the first time on this trip we were treated to a bit of sunshine.  As such, we decided to stay at Gore Bay to catch the sunset from a lookout point overlooking the bay.

After a quiet dinner back at the lodge (we were cooking ourselves!) we ventured outside with all our gear to do some night time photography.  For a bit of fun, we even did some light painting!