On the morning of the 17th our two boats Cascadia and Kula left the docks in search of some whales! they ended up finding a cow/calf pair of humpbacks in the Strait of Georgia! This mother humpback was BCX1057 Divot! Divot is a humpback that we have been seeing consistently in the last few years and its great to see her returning with a calf! Divot can be identified by the “divot” taken out of the trailing edge of her tail fluke on the right side. Since she was not fluking during our encounter we had to instead look at her dorsal for our ID. Using the dorsal for identification can be a little trickier since most humpbacks dorsals look very similar but we were able to match Divots dorsal against the catalogue in this case because it has a unique “swoop” to the fin. Since when we see calves with their mothers they tend not to show off their tail flukes it’s important to try and get photos of their dorsals as well so when they travel by themselves in the future we can cross-match the dorsal fins and know which whale we are looking at! After spending time with these two lovely humpbacks the tour left to find other wildlife and got some stellers sea lions and harbour seals! the harbour seals in particular this time of year are exciting to see because its pupping season! if you are looking at any seals yourself be sure to keep an extra sharp eye out for tiny little bundles of fur close to their moms or left on their own on the beach. These little pups will only be reliant on their moms for about a month before they start fending for themselves!

While getting ready to leave for the 3:30pm tour we got word that there were some fast moving transient orca over near the Sunshine Coast so we left and headed in that direction. We determined that there were two pods travelling together here; the T065A’s and the T137s! If all the members of both pods were here that would mean we were looking at a total of 10 whales! These whales were travelling along spread out over a half mile area so it was difficult to get an exact number of whales present. When there are multiple pods present on the water the easiest way to count is waiting for all the whales to surface at the same time so you can make sure you aren’t double counting. The other way is by looking back on the photos of the encounter and IDing all the individual whales that you managed to snap a photo of! we managed to do this for some whales today and found pictures of T065A “Fingers”, T065A4 “Ellifrit”, T065A2 “Ooxjaa” for the T065A pod and T137B “Tempest”, T137A “Jack”, and T137D “Wright”. Since we confirmed these whales to be present and none of these pod members are known to travel separately from the rest of their pod we can assume that all the other members of the pod were also here. On the way back home both boats also got to see some harbour seals and sea lions! Kula, our semi-covered boat was also lucky enough to find a humpback whale but it was being very tricky and we didn’t manage to get any photos of it!

Please enjoy all the photos from the day taken by our marine naturalists Cheyenne Brewster and Brad Farrow.