There was one Port on Vancouver Island we regularly visited, could be Harmac or possibly Chemainous, where to get to the local pub you had to trek for a mile or so through the woods. The stevedores always used to warn us of there being bears in those woods but being jolly sailors we used to scoff at them, a night on the ale meant more than worrying about bears attacking you on the way to/from the pub and anyway we were British sailors, not afraid of anything---yeah!.
On one trip when I was cadet, the Captain { a rather strange person} decided he wanted a flower garden built on the deck outside his cabin and I was tasked with the job of building this garden for him. As we were a forest product ship there was always loads of timber on board and I set too making up his flower beds using timber for the framing.
By the time we got to Harmac the {or Chemainous} framing was ready to be filled with soil and at one of these ports there was an easily accessible from the dock side, a meadow that ran up to the woods. Yours truly decided that this would be the best spot to find the soil for these flower beds so armed with bucket and shovel I set off to dig up sufficient soil to fill said beds.
The only place I could find where the ground was easily dug up to get to the soil was up near the tree line and so I spent the afternoon digging up the ground and humping buckets of soil back to the ship to fill those flower beds. On my last trip for soil, on reaching the ship a looked back at the area I had been digging up and there was a bloody big bear snuffling around in the area I had been digging up!!! Don't know if it had been watching this idiot digging up the ground and was waiting for me to return or whether it was just curious and having a little forage but I was certainly not going back to investigate.
After making these beds and filling it with soil, the next task was to go to a local garden centre and buy plants to fill them with. This entailed me trailing along with this Captain to assist in carrying all the plants he was going to buy. On arrival at the garden centre he handed me $20 and told me to go off and buy myself a burger at a nearby joint whilst he wandered around selecting his plants. Next door to the burger joint was a pub so that's where the $20 was spent.
A couple of hours later we arrived back on board with all the plants he had brought and it was my task to put them into the beds and tend to them. All this work, building and filling said beds and then planting and looking after them, had taken up a considerable amount of my time, something the Chief Officer was not too pleased about as he had other uses for my time such as chipping and painting or greasing wires on the gantry cranes, but hey who was I too argue, I was only following the Captains orders.
This demands on my time by the Captain grew even more on the homeward bound trip when he decided to remodel his cabin and I was tasked with the job of fixing the botched job he had made of it. A one or two day task turned into almost 10 days work as most of the time was spent drinking coffee and eating tab nabs with the Captain and not been allowed to start work before 0930 and having extended smokos and then having to knock off between 1300 and 1500 whist he had his afternoon siesta and then by 1600 hours the sun was over the yard arm and it was time for refreshments at the end of the working day, meant that I was lucky to get 2 hours of actual work done. This again annoyed the Chief Officer as again he had other tasks for me planned, chipping and painting, tightening deck cargo lashings, cleaning and greasing the gantry cranes etc. etc. but hey I was just following the Captains orders wasn't I.
An absolutely fabulous trip, Tilbury, Rotterdam, Jacksonville, Vancouver and Vancouver Island and then back to Tilbury after 21 days loading in B.C. and Vancouver Island and one in which I actually got to see a grizzly bear instead of just being told about them and even seeing it from a distance of a hundred yards or so, I was dam glad that was as close as I ever got to one.
rgds
JA
p.s
those flower beds lasted until 3 days after leaving B.C. the Spanish crew, who did not like the Captain due to his attitude regarding subs, washed the whole lot away as they were washing down the accommodation after being on the coast.