On August 5th we left the harbor and headed north on some reports of whales near Neck Point. We found a single humpback doing deep dives. After watching the whale for a little bit we decided to try our luck in finding someone else nearby. Our boats headed South towards Gabriola Island, where we found 2 Humpbacks, our little friend Kelpie hanging out with another unidentified whale. These two were also doing some deep dives as they searched the waters for delicious food.

Humpback whales spending the entire summer eating everything they can to put on weight for their migration South. These whales will eat roughly 3000 lbs of food every day, and when your food is tiny, roughly the size of large french fries, that’s a lot of food! A humpbacks throat is about as big around as a small grapefruit or slightly larger than a human fist. The Humpbacks need to put on enough weight to sustain themselves throughout the winter, because once they leave our cold northern waters they won’t eat again until they return in the late spring next year.

After leaving these 2 we also found a trio of Humpbacks off Valdes Island. This trio was Anvil, Smiley and Fader. They were doing deep feeding dives, just like Kelpie and their friend. These three are adult humpbacks, so are roughly 40 ft long and can be up to 90,000 lbs! As they did their dives they were throwing their tails high in the air giving us great shots of their tails and making it easy to ID these 3.

Below are all the photos our naturalists, Rebeka, Ryan and Brad took during the morning tour.

3:30 Tour:

in the afternoon our boats headed back on the water to see where our whales had ended up. We got a call that a pod of Orcas had been seen off Richmond so we traveled across the strait. We kept our eyes open for Humpbacks along the way and one of our boats had found Anvil, Smile and Fader again. Doing the same deep dives as earlier.
We caught up with our Orcas as they were making their way towards the Vancouver Harbor. This pod was the T137’s, traveling with the T36A2 (2012) and 36A3 (2015). Kailas and Mike iii have been traveling closing to Jack for a while and seem to have chosen him as their new older brother. Neither Kailas nor Mike have been confirmed male or female, and with neither whale having hit puberty we are curious as to why these 2 have spent so much time away from mom and their older sister.

These 6 were traveling and hunting slowly towards Vancouver, and when we left them had turned towards the Strait of Georgia.

After leaving our Transient Orcas, one of our boats came across Anvil and Smiley doing more deep dives in the Strait, and who we think was Fader off in the distance, much closer to Valdes Island.

August 5th - Humpbacks in the morning and double species in the after noon!

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