Yup, bear encounter #2.  Fortunately WE were on Charisma and Mr. Bear was on the beach.  It was a different bear than before as bear #1 had a distinct gash above his right eye and this one did not.  We are being more diligent about bringing our noise maker (a can with rocks in it that Ann shakes vigorously as we walk) ashore as well as our air horn (like at Cal Games) that hopefully would scare a bear should we encounter one and pepper spray now that we have actually SEEN the bears.  We hope not to have to resort to the pepper spray since the directions are to, “wait unit the bear is 12 feet away before deploying spray”.  These bears are very big.

So…today, the sun came out a little and we moved all of a mile across Beware Channel to Dead Man’s Cove.  Nice.  This is where the Monk’s Wall is located.  After anchoring, we jumped in the dinghy with the requisite bear repelling equipment and went ashore.  Just in from the tree line we found the wall.  As the guide books will note, it was not actually built by Chinese Monks as was initially rumored, but by a couple who built a trading post here in the mid-1800’s.  Very cool nonetheless.  We also found some very old “stuff” on the ground – porcelain and iron items – and put them on a board near the wall where they belong.  The area actually encompasses several rock walls built to make a trading post. A house, yard and probably livestock enclosure.  It was impressive how many linear feet of granite wall was built – by hand.  A rough guess on my part would be about 200 yards of wall, over four feet high as well as the main trading post wall that was over eight feet high and wrapped around a footprint in the neighborhood of 30 by 40 feet.  Must have been pretty impressive in the mid-eighteen hundreds!  And all done by hand.

Tomorrow we hope to move about 8 miles north to a cove just outside of some native First Nation ruins.  We’ll report on that when we see it

A couple more days and we plan to be in Port McNeil on Vancouver island where hopefully  we’ll have a strong enough internet signal to post the many, many great photos we’ve been saving for these posts.  Cross fingers!