June 17th - A whale of a day off of Gabriola

June 17th turned out to be a very exciting trip when we encountered two very curious humpback whales in the Strait of Georgia east of Gabriola Island. These two whales were Fader and Incognito and boy, did they put on a show!

Humpback whales are known for their surface behaviours and their unique interactions with other animals in their habitat, from protecting seals and seal lions from orca to doing impressive jumps out of the water! On todays trip it turned out to be us who these whales wanted to interact with. Lucky for us these whales gave us some indication before coming towards the boat so we were already shut down for several minutes before this encounter and just floating in the strait, waiting to see where they would surface again. Much to our surprise they surfaced right next to the boat! “Mugging” is a somewhat rare behaviour that is seen in whales were they will approach boats and check them out! It was clear this was happening today by one of the humpbacks doing a spy-hop out of the water so they could see us more clearly. You can see part of that spy hop in the photo below. Since we usually have much more distance between ourselves and the whales our big camera lens gets some pretty close photos during these unusual encounters.

This is a very close-up view of the tip of the humpbacks face! These bumps you are seeing are called tubercles. Can you spot the barnacles on their chin too?

These whales stayed close to the boats and we got to just float and watch them swimming playfully around. once our time was up with the whales they had luckily gotten bored with us and had moved on further away so we were able to start our engines and move slowly away from them. Once we had left them behind we searched the Strait of Georgia and through the gulf islands and found a ton of adorable harbour seals as well as a very photogenic eagle. The rest of the photos taken by marine naturalist Ryan Uslu are below so be sure to check them out!

A good shot straight up the double nostrils of one of our humpbacks.

Fader’s fluke!

This photo shows the size of a humpback whale! The whale did a head stand a few meters away from this boat and you can see the size of the fluke compared to the vessel.