It was another amazing day spent travelling the Salish Sea on the 16th! We spent some time in what can only be called “humpback soup”. It seemed like we couldn’t stop finding humpbacks during our day, as the morning tour saw 4 humpback whales, and in the afternoon we found 2 of our morning whales plus a new face!

The humpback hot spot this year seems to be off Porlier pass, a narrow passage between the south end of Valdez Island and the North point of Galiano Island. In the Strait of Georgia a steep shelf runs parallel to the islands, and this seems to be where many of our humpbacks are hanging out this year, feeding on small schooling fish and krill that live in our cold waters.

On this beautiful day we got to watch Slate and her Calf “Marble” traveling and “logging”, a behaviour typically done when whales are sleeping. Because Humpbacks need to surface to breath and watch out for any potential dangers, they sleep with half their brain on, and half off.
After hanging out with Slate and her son we continued traveling north along Valdez, slowing making our way home, when we encounters Orion and his friend. Orion is a large whale we’ve encountered over the years. He was a bit late returning to us this year but He’s finally back to our region! He may have spent the first half of their summer down in the San Juan Islands or the south side of Vancouver Island, and then ventured north to our region to feed and hang out with some friends.

Orion and his friend were traveling and fluking, and even gave our boats a close pass, inspecting them before continuing on their way.

In the afternoon our tours were able to catch up again with Slate and Marble. They were a little more awake after their morning nap and gave our boat a good show. Marble was his usual self, rolling around, splashing and playing next to the boats.

We have noticed new scars on the base of Marble’s tail recently that look like propeller marks. Marble is a young curious calf, and is known to approach boats and play near them. Whenever he approaches our vessels we make sure our motors are lifted out of the water, until he has moved far away. We always worry about whales that seem to enjoy being near boats because they can get to comfortable and not all boats are going to be friendly. As cool and exciting as it is when whales do approach vessels and play near them, we always hope that it’s a phase they will grow out of to reduce the chance they will get injured. We hope that these new scars will heal quickly and hopefully Marble has learned a lesson about getting to close to boats.

After leaving our Mom and calf for the last time that day we traveled a bit before finding another familiar face. This time it was Ocular. Ocular is a young 5 year old Humpback we’ve spent a lot of time with this year. Ocular has some deep scaring at the base of his tail, most likely from entanglement. Over 50% of our whales have scars from entanglement. Entanglement occurs most often when derelict fishing gear gets wrapped around an animal. Derelict gear is typically nets and ropes that have been lost during storm events accidentally get dislodged while left unattended in the water. Canada’s east coast has started a new program to transition to easy break gear, which is designed to break apart easily if a whale or other animal becomes entangled. When humpbacks become entangled its can prevent them from swimming properly, surfacing to breath and potentially prevent them from eating food.
Ocular’s scars indicate that he had some sort of gear wrapped around the base of his tail and the scars have healed poorly, resulting in symmetrical, large bumps at the base of his tail.

After leaving our whales we found some seals and sea lions to look at before returning to our harbour for the night.