It never rains, but it pours.

We arrived in Vancouver during what is usually the rainy season but have been blessed with nearly uninterrupted sunshine. This is not to say that the first international stop on our Tour has gone entirely smoothly. I managed to slip and cut my elbow fairly badly on the first day though at a cost of $995 dollars for just a consultation we weren’t sure our travel insurers would let us get away with that when the hospital mentioned there were clinics we could also walk in to around the corner. Off we went, only to find out they’d all shut early for Chinese New Year. In the end, we spent 2% of the consultation cost in a pharmacy and conducted some first aid at home. Thankfully my jacket had not ripped and so had prevented anything untoward getting in to the wound and within three days I had full mobility back and it’s healing nicely. Both Kathryn and I also contracted colds and while mine manifested mostly as a blocked nose, Kathryn has been less fortunate with a sore throat and was close to losing her voice. Not ideal timing with both of our 1.5 hour events looming! The rest is all good news as far as we’re concerned though. Vancouver is a beautiful city with a stunning backdrop and mossy trees. We’re also fortunate enough to be here when many roads are lined with trees in blossom. We’ve also been delighted by the friendliness of the locals and their interest in the environment.

Our talks at Vancouver Diving Locker and Rowands Reef consisted of smaller but passionate audiences of divers who enjoyed the shark tales, were hugely supportive of our cause and informed us of some of the things being done in Vancouver in the support of sharks. The city has a large Asian community which results in Shark Fin Soup being found on a number of menus. While finning and associated activities are banned here, shark fins are still imported for the restaurants and there is a campaign being run to have this banned too.

We also had our first school visit at Henry Hudson Elementary School. It was a very busy day with 8 groups (approximately 300 pupils) to get around but what a day it was! The children were all incredibly well behaved, always raising hands rather than interrupting and, barring a couple of the kindergartners who enthusiastically wanted to tell us about the time they saw a porpoise, they asked relevant and interesting questions. Teachers and pupils alike were amazed by the sheer number of sharks we humans kill each year and a new generation of Friends for Sharks are very much on the rise! One girl in particular is now looking forward to a family holiday in Fiji so she can swim with the sharks there – she’d previously told her dad she was too scared to do it. We wish her a happy holiday and a wonderful experience! I think this quote from a parent sums up nicely how the day went:

“My kids have been talking about the travesty of the shark fin industry, how we have to protect sharks and how they won’t hurt you. So I think it went well!”

Our visit to the school also happened to coincide with ‘pink shirt day’. This is an annual event which promotes the issues around bullying stemming from a particular day when a child was bullied for wearing a pink shirt to school. Another pupil who saw what happened organised for all the rest of the children to come to school in pink shirts the following day. We incorporated this story in to our talks, comparing it with the respect sharks show each other and the lack of aggression in the vast majority of their interactions.

Our final event at Beaty Biodiversity Museum was also a great success. Our longest uninterrupted speaking stint (we’d had a half time break at Roward’s Reef) of an hour and a half…

…At least that’s where I left off writing the blog before we headed off on Saturday morning for the event itself. I will never anticipate the expected greatness or otherwise of any event ever again. We arrived in plenty of time, the museum itself looks fantastic and we were shown to the spacious lecture theatre where the event was scheduled to take place. At midday the doors opened and a few people started to wander in to take their seats for our due start at 12:30. The museum wasn’t especially busy as the inhabitants of Vancouver tend to make use of good weather where they can, so such events have a habit of being better attended when it’s raining, but no worries, we still had interested people looking forward to an enlightening talk on sharks.

At 12:25 disaster struck in the form of the fire alarm. The building was cleared and we gathered outside the museum to gaze at an utter lack of flames, smoke and mayhem. The fire department duly arrived and wandered in to find the cause. This was discovered to be an electrical fault somewhere in a janitor’s cupboard. Unfortunately it was not something they were equipped to deal with so the alarm would remain on for at least an hour while a suitable electrician was found.

By this point most of our audience had dissipated and we were left with 6 of our own friends, the organiser and Bob who was really keen to hear about sharks. As it was the weekend, we couldn’t gain access to any other near-by lecture theatres so we wandered over to a café and set up the laptop in front of our reduced audience. We were by now nearly an hour late in starting so we changed to our 1 hour presentation rather than the original 1.5 hour talk. In the end everyone had fun and considering the circumstances, it could be said to have been a great success. Bob certainly seemed happy with what he’d heard.

We will now be heading to Rarotonga (The Cook Islands) where we will have limited internet access, though stay tuned for another Vancouver blog geared towards this week’s more touristy activities. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks with a rundown of our Pacific Island adventure and photos of… well we’re not sure what to expect. They seem to have thunderstorms at the moment so expect the unexpected!