Whale Watching in Sooke: Orcas, Humpbacks, and a Little Help from Psilocybin

Last summer, Dean and I took his two teenage daughters on a 5-day trip to Vancouver Island—Sooke, BC to be specific. We stayed at a campground where we could hook up our 26-foot travel trailer to electricity and sewage. The location was a wide-open lot with a few trees, but it had a large field where we could walk the dogs and it had great showers. The first few days were spent exploring Victoria, doing tours like Butchart Gardens and Hatley Castle. But after those boxes were ticked, I wanted to make sure we could do something else special for the girls to remember the trip. We settled on booking a tour with Sooke Whale Watching.

I brought psilocybin gummies on the trip, and before we left for the boat, I nervously put a 1g gummy into my jacket pocket for the boat ride. I wanted to wait to see if the ocean would make me sea-sick before I took it, but it was a smooth and calm ride on the 24 passenger zodiac. We had breakfast that morning before our tour, but I could only manage to eat a few bites of my waffles and I was zapped of energy. The nausea from my medications was just starting to interfere with my enjoyment of the little things.

The morning started slow. We had to be at the whale watching launch at 11am, so we had a lot of time to get ready. We went out for breakfast and then headed to Sooke Whale Watching. Immediately, we discovered that someone had siphoned diesel from Dean's truck the night before. It was disappointing, and a big reason I won't review that campsite. There I was, wearing jeans and my jean jacket, with the 1 gram gummy tucked into the left chest pocket. They had rows of suits for us to put on, like spacesuits but they were floatation devices. We stepped into the suits and zipped them up, then went out onto the dock to wait to load the boat.

When we got on the boat, we stepped down into a large blown up zodiac that seated about 24 people. All four of us sat down next to each other in one row. The boat driver explained that we were going out to look for humpbacks and orcas. The company boasted a 90% success rate for seeing whales. The day was sunny with some clouds in the sky and we looked at the mountains in the distance as we navigated out into the Salish sea.

Within an hour, we had seen humpbacks and we sat and watched them for about 15 minutes. Then, our boat driver set off in search of the orcas. He could hear over the radio where some had been spotted. We drove for about 20 minutes and found the family of orcas that we'd be watching for the next half hour.

There was a whole family - a baby, and a mom and a dad, but there might have been four in the pod. It was beautiful to see them breach the water and blow water out then decend again. I got the feeling that they knew we were there and they weren't willing to show off. I started to relax into the trip, because the boat ride was smooth, I unzipped the top of my floatation suit, reached into the left pocket of my jacket and grabbed the gummy.

As I was taking it out of the tinfoil wrapper, I said a little prayer hoping it wouldn't make me sick. Earlier that summer, I had taken a different strain on a float down a river and it made me sick as it hit me. I threw up for at least 30 minutes that time, luckily this time was entirely different.

We had seen enough of the orcas and had enough time left in our tour, so we headed back to watch the humpbacks some more. As we rode out towards them, I stared at the mountains and thought about painting them. The horizon was so distant, but it looked like where we belonged and I was happy to be a resident of British Columbia.

Within 30 minutes, I started to feel the glow of the psilocybin. The waves felt gentle and unrelenting. I didn't feel worried about anything. I felt the sun. I saw the coastline. And then, I saw the tail of a humpback breaching the water in the distance. We kept moving closer to the whales and I was ready for a final show.

After watching the whales for another 20 minutes, it was time to head back to shore. I didn't feel intoxicated by the gummy. It reversed the trend towards nausea and made everything glow a little differently. When the humpbacks breached the water, it felt magical, special and unrepeatable. I was in awe of nature and felt all the feels I could because I travelled deliberately.

When we got back to shore, we went straight back to the trailer to let the dogs out for a pee. The girls walked the dogs, which was really helpful and allowed me to relax and prepare for a late lunch. I just kept feeling glowy and smiling for the rest of the day. I was so happy that we had success on our trip. saw both kinds of whales, and returned to shore without any vomit story to have to live down.

You don't need a perfect appetite or flawless health to make unforgettable travel memories; you just need the right pacing and a supportive crew. While the psilocybin gummy allowed me to fully experience the awe of the Salish Sea, it was Dean's daughters who sustained that magic back at the campground. Their willingness to handle the dogs gave me the exact window of rest my body was screaming for. It was a beautiful reminder that when we share the weight of our limitations, we create the space to live deeply, travel deliberately, and find awe in the unexpected.