Today we left Nanaimo harbour in Keta, on of our zodiac boats. We traveled outside Gabriola Island and into the strait where we spotted the first blow. It wasn’t long until we saw another. We had found Humpbacks!

The first 2 we found were doing long dives and surfacing irregularly, so we headed off in search of other whales. We didn’t make it very far when we found 2 more. It didn’t seem to matter what direction we looked we could see the tell tail mist of a Humpback breathing in the distance.

We managed to get some great photos of some of our Humpbacks from the day and even got ID’s for 3 of them.

Beak is the 2014 calf of Big momma (BCY0324. Beak was pretty tough to ID because they have small white markings that at first didn’t show up in the photos. But after some photo editing we were able to see the marks that helped us determine this whales ID.

Along with Beak we also had BCZ0298, better know as Split Fin. We only saw Split fin for a brief minute and managed to get a top view of their flukes. This made IDing Split fin pretty tough, as all our fluke shots are typically of the bottom of the flukes. What is interesting about this is that Split Fin is also a calf from Big Momma from 2016. So these 2 are siblings!

Unlike Beak and Split fin, Valiant was very easy to ID. Valiant has a lot of scaring on their fluke, and is even missing the ends on each side. These scares and damage was done by orcas. The white marks are actually orca teeth rake marks. Valiant is a pretty tough little whale to have had such an encounter with Orcas and made it out.