The first thing Tom Sewid did when his friend on the boat roared like a gorilla into the February darkness off Quadra Island was listen. Something roared back from the hillside across the bay. The next morning, on the beach, there were broken cockle shells. The night after that, on the rising tide, Tom’s FLIR picked up a heat signature on the boulder beach and he had the presence of mind to hold his cell phone lens up to the eyepiece and hit record. Sixteen minutes and 40 seconds of what he describes, without hesitation, as a bipedal Sasquatch eating chitons off the rocks.
I’ve spoken with Sasquatch researchers on the podcast before, including Shannon Sinn from Victoria and Chris Burger, who had his own sighting in the Coombs area as a teenager. Tom Sewid is something different. He’s not a researcher who went looking for Sasquatch. He’s a hunter and commercial fisherman who spent his working life in the coastal bush of BC and simply kept encountering them – over 30 times, by his own count, with twice putting himself within five or six feet of one.
Tom grew up in Alert Bay, where Tsunawa – the wild woman of the woods, a female Sasquatch – is carved at the base of the memorial totem poles in the burial ground and holds the highest rank among the crests of the Kwakwaka’wakŵ and Lekwungen First Nations. He was 11 or 12 when he and his father came down a hill near Campbell River at night and the truck lights caught something on the guardrail that stood up and launched itself into the darkness. He slid across the bench seat and sat right beside his dad the rest of the way home.
He studied alongside the late Dr. John Bindernagel for over 25 years. The lesson that stuck: when in doubt, throw it out. No portals, no cloaking, no UFOs. Just evidence, rigorously collected. Tom carries that with him into every investigation and onto every stage he speaks from – including Squatch Watch Vancouver Island 2026 in the Comox Valley this month.
He also says Sasquatch activity along the Englishman River corridor near Parksville is worth paying attention to. I’ll leave that with you.
Hear the full conversation with Tom Sewid on The PULSE Community Podcast at: https://bit.ly/S2EP34PulsePodcast
Peter McCully is a multimedia creator and podcast host based in Parksville, BC. https://mccullymedia.ca/category/blog/