Our semi-covered boat and one open boat headed out into the Strait of Georgia this afternoon. We’ve been having pretty good luck out there with Humpback Whales lately. We have a 95% success rate of finding whales for our guests. This afternoon was no different. Within an hour of pushing off, both of our boats had a humpback whale to hang out with.

Our open vessel Cascadia ended up finding Prowler (BCX1660) while our semi-covered vessel Kula found Graphite (BCX2077). Out here in the Strait, there’s a lot of food for Humpback Whales. Our waters are filled with plankton, which are tiny little plants and animals that make our waters pretty murky. Plankton undertakes a daily migration, moving down in the water column for the day, and coming back up to the surface at night. What’s the reason for this? It is to avoid predation during the day! Humpback whales are adapted for diving, and can reach 300 meters on their best days, but generally will stay shallower than that. At depth, there are a lot of plankton, small fish, and small shrimp-like creatures known as krill. Once at depth, a humpback whale will open its mouth and take in a gulp of seawater. Humpbacks have pleats running from their chin to their stomach, which can help expand their mouth and take a bigger mouthful. They close their mouth and push out everything that’s not food through their baleen. Baleen is essentially a huge filter hanging down from the top of their mouth made out of a protein called keratin. Then they swallow their food.

Fun fact: you cannot get swallowed by a humpback whale! Their throat is only about as big as an orange, or about 10 centimetres in diameter, so they couldn’t swallow a person even if they wanted to. Prowler and Graphite didn’t seem too interested in us today though - just the food hanging out below the surface. So we left them to it and went to see who else we could find!

We were successful and came across Niagara (BCY0057) and Yogi (BCY0409). Both of these whales are in their 20s, so they’re likely 15 or 16 meters long and between 30 and 40 tons! Graphite from earlier is only 3 years old, so they’re quite a bit smaller than these two! It’s always fun for us to see the diversity of whales here in the Salish Sea. We watched these two whales for a while and then headed off to find some other wildlife.

While our focus is of course the whales, we also stop for multiple other species of wildlife. Today we got to see some Harbour Seals, Steller Sea Lions, Cormorants, Seagulls, Bald Eagles, and even happened across a Rhinocerous Auklet and our resident family of River Otters at the dock! It was a gorgeous day on the Salish Sea.

Photos today were taken by Marine Naturalists Aly Kohlman and Hayleigh Hilbert.