Becoming a sea kayak guide elevated my life in ways I never could have imagined. Originally roaming from Australia, I was an unapologetic ocean snob… I believed that unless the water was clear and blue, it simply wasn’t that spectacular.

Guiding in the abundant waters of the Pacific Northwest changed everything. Suddenly, I was spending my days traveling through Blackfish Sound, the Broughton Archipelago, and Johnstone Strait, immersed in a world I had never truly seen before. I learned that clear water doesn’t equal beautiful - it often means the opposite. Here, the water is ALIVE!, DENSE! with nutrients, RICH! with billions of microscopic phytoplankton, stirred by powerful tides and constant upwelling from the ocean floor.

This incredible exchange creates one of the most productive marine ecosystems on Earth. So abundant it sustains some of the ocean’s largest giants, who return each summer to feed before journeying back to distant breeding grounds. Hello beautiful Humpback and Orca friends. 

I have never experienced a landscape so alive, teeming with life, movement, and quiet wonder. These images capture just a small glimpse of the infinite, magical moments I was lucky enough to share in this extraordinary place.

But this area didn’t just move me. It moved every single person who arrived with enough curiosity to enter her sacred waters. My guests, fellow guides, friends that I swooned with stories long enough until they joined me in exploration… we all came prepared for beauty, but left with a sense of connectedness that’s hard to put into words. Though I will try…

We breathed in rhythm with humpback whales as we dozed off to sleep. We shared the thrill and carefreeness of a dolphin leaping clear of the water. We slowed our pace to truly notice the intricacies of the intertidal—a barnacle feeding with its feathery, flowing arms, algae actively photosynthesizing in rock pools, releasing the tiniest and cutest bubbles of air you had ever seen. And suddenly, without effort, we found ourselves completely and utterly present.

It felt as though the land and water were gently luring us back to our center with a delicate lullaby. The unspoken (and spoken) consensus was always the same: we left feeling like the best versions of ourselves. Our most authentic, raw, intoxicated with europhia, selves.

And nothing in us was quite the same.

The coast remembered us….and we remembered ourselves.