The first time we saw the Pacific was after we had travelled overland across Canada from Toronto to British Columbia and then driven southwest, crossed the US border and the Cascades, and arrived in the spectacular seaside city of Seattle. So the first time we saw this great ocean was in one of its great anchorages.
Only later, and again on a subsequent visit, did we see the first of the many Pacific beaches which run down the west coast of the Americas, beaches upon which the Pacific's waves beat in an unending roar.
One of the joys of television is that it brings the distant into one's sitting room, so we already expected to find beaches littered with timber from the west coast forests, but the reality is far more breathtaking than any TV programme. The beaches run for miles. The logs are massive. The beach pebbles are a treasure-trove of minerals. Nothing, nothing, is on a small scale - but that is America.
Between the beaches are rocky headlands, steep, dark cliffs, forest-capped stacks, and small, deeply-cut bays in which....
....leviathans play, in this case a humpback cow and her calf.
The Pacific is spectacular but so mis-named: it never seems still, never at peace, not even under a glorious sunset sky.
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