Once, in the middle of the night in bad weather where the Columbia River comes slashing out to the sea, I had been caught up in dodging half-sunken logs pushed out of the river into open water – many boats have been sunk by them over the years – and I accidentally moved between what I found to be a large male orca and his family pod. He was well back, perhaps a quarter mile, and when he saw my boat nearer to his family than he was, he thrashed the waves with his flukes and roared up between us, jumping well clear of the water as he came next to me – all of him in mid-air – to show me that he wanted me to move away. Now. I did so and that was it; no further demonstration.

When I first saw an iceberg, near the entrance to the Tracy Arm Fjord, south of Juneau, it was from a distance of six or seven miles and I was certain it was a blue-and-white cruise ship. My boat was very slow and moved towards it in seeming inches. I noticed in time – still thinking it was a ship, not an iceberg – that it wasn’t moving at all. Ships, to retain control, must keep moving and this one seemed locked in one place. So perhaps, I thought, either a ship in trouble or not a ship.

As I at last drew near enough to find it was a giant blue iceberg, I was absolutely stunned by its size and colour. It was huge, like an ice island, and as blue as the sky. Blue icebergs are formed from older, deep glaciers whose massive weight, over an uncountable amount of time, compresses much of the air out of the snow and ice. The subsequent airless glacial ice becomes a beautiful blue and is eventually ‘calved’ into the sea. It incidentally melts very slowly as well, as I found when chunks were put in the crude ice-box on my boat. The reason this berg was so still and unmoving was that as the tide moved out and the water became more shallow it hung up on the bottom. When the tide came in, the water grew deeper and it floated again. They are not particularly dangerous except that sometimes they are fairly top heavy and will roll-flop over suddenly. If you are caught under one, it will obviously go very bad – like having a small country land on you.

One evening I was tucked in a cove on the north end of Vancouver Island, a cove the fishermen used to hide from the astonishingly horrible storm seas to the north, where in the open ocean top-breaking waves of up to a hundred feet in height simply destroy.

Destroy.