Wonder Comes First, Respect Follows
A morning surfing at Cox Bay in Tofino reveals how wonder, respect and the feelings guests remember can shape a destination’s story.
James Hague
11/12/20263 min read
Three or four of us and first light
When I lived in Tofino, there were mornings in early spring when only three or four of us would be out for a surf at Cox Bay. This was before the summer crowds arrived, on the kind of crisp, cool day when the beach was empty and the first light was only starting to come up.
You would paddle out in a full wetsuit and hood with the cold stinging whatever skin was left showing. Between the sets there was a calm I have rarely found anywhere since, a quiet that made the effort of getting out there feel like part of the reward.
A wall of green, and something moving through it
Getting past the break means going under or over each wave as it arrives. You come up from a duck dive, look ahead to see what you have to deal with next, and watch the next wave start to wall up in front of you.
On some of those mornings, a sea lion would shoot straight across the inside of that wall of green. Sometimes a second one followed, chasing the first through the tube. These are animals that can weigh up to a thousand pounds, and they were moving through water the rest of us were struggling to read as though it took no effort at all.
I never knew what they were doing in there, whether they were feeding or whether something else was going on. To me it always looked like they were playing, and having a wonderful time doing it.
Surfing can feel like visiting another planet, because the ocean is so plainly somewhere we do not come from. You immerse yourself in this enormous body of water, try to understand how it moves, and carry a little ambition to master it. Then a sea lion passes through the face of a wave in front of you, and you understand that you are dabbling.
Whose home it is
The feeling could change quickly once you made it out past the break. Some mornings there would be dozens of sea lions gathered together, and if they decided you were too close they would swim toward you with their heads out of the water, all of them barking. They have teeth, and they were telling us to move off.
The wonder now came with a fair amount of anxiety, and with it a very clear sense of whose home I was in. They were there first and they belonged there, while I was travelling through, so the space deserved my respect.
What has stayed with me all these years is the whole sequence, which ran from excitement, joy and stillness on the way out to an immediate awareness of how small I was in a much wider world.
What a destination is selling
I think about those mornings whenever I work on how a destination or a property tells its story. Tofino has plenty to list, and the list is the easy part, because beaches, old-growth forest, surf breaks and wildlife photograph well and fit neatly into a brochure.
What people travel for is harder to put on a page. Someone choosing where to spend a week is imagining how it will feel to be there, and in my case that feeling was a wave rising in front of me, an animal passing through it, and the two things the moment left behind. Wonder came first, and respect followed.
Most destinations and most independent properties are confident about the inventory and quiet about the feeling. You can see it when a guest review describes the stay more vividly than the property's own website does, because the guest is writing about what happened to them and the website is still listing what is there.
Finding your own version of that morning
Every place worth visiting has a moment like this one, and the people who work there usually know what it is. It might be the first coffee on the deck before anyone else is up, or the fire lit in the lodge when guests come in from the cold, or the stretch of road where the valley opens and the car goes quiet.
The useful work is to name that moment, find out what guests felt when it happened, and put it in front of people before they book, in the photography, the pre-arrival email and the way the stay is described. In my experience that is where rate confidence and direct bookings start, since a guest who already knows what the morning will feel like has a reason to choose you that a list of amenities cannot give them.
If your property or region has a moment like that, and your guests describe it better than your own marketing does, I would be glad to compare notes.