Day 11

We woke up at 6am today and were hoping to cover some ground, and were looking forward to some crab/salmon breakfast/lunch, and some burgers for dinner!!! Although we learned yesterday that the beach route was slower than the bush path, it was such a beautiful morning, and the Tsusiat point looked really cool in the distance that we decided to start the day with a beach walk. We would make an occasional side route to climb a boulder in the ocean.
We opted to head into the forest the first chance we got after Tsusiat point. We walked for approximately 7km that morning, on the beach, through the forest (and some reserves), until we got to Nitnat river. We needed to take a ferry crossing. The guy who drove the boat was the one who sold us fresh salmon or crab. Michael ordered crab, while Travis and I ordered Salmon. It was SOO good! (albeit quite expensive). We asked, and he said the burger place probably closed around 6pm and we should be able to make it by then. So we decided to bust it and get a burger for dinner! We were making decent time, but not good enough to make it for 6. So we decided to take a quick break to decide what we should do. We could camp out at the 42km mark and have burgers in the morning, or we could bust it to the 46km mark (our original plan) and hope they're still serving food. We decided to stay at the 42km site until Sean caught up to us. He pointed out that if we wanted to make Owen's point (which we did) on Sat, we would need to camp out at Camper's to ensure we could make it before the tides came in. Therefore, we should camp out at the 46km tonight to cover enough ground to make it to Camper's tomorrow. We thought that sounded smarter than basing our decisions on burgers (which we could easily get off the trail as well) so we hiked the rest of the way with Sean. When we got to the 42km campground, we noticed that the two Germans were there already. Sean said he was hiking with them earlier, and they took the beach route while he took the forest. Therefore, we decided to stay along the forest if it was going to be quicker. It was really quick. The beach today had firmer sand, and smoother rock shelves. Therefore, we covered quite a bit of ground! We stayed on the beach until the path led into the forest via the lighthouse. It was a bit of a steep climb up to the lighthouse (where there was a really nice view!), then mostly downhill through the forest back to the beach. Michael and Travis took a bit of a side route that resulted in them getting wet trying to get back off the rocks (and then they had to detour back through to forest again just to make it back to the beach without being soaked head to toe by the ocean). There were three WOOFers working on the reserve (at Chez Monique's), who were still around, chilling out. They cooked us up a burger for dinner, and it was delicious! We then went to set up camp and build a fire. We finished off the smores and vodka and camped out under the stars. I went inside the tent part way through the night because my sleeping bag was getting a bit wet. The other two stayed camped out and apparently by morning, all their things dried (according to Michael, Travis was fast asleep all night and didn't notice anything wet at all).