Every year, as we enter September and head into the fall season, we notice an increase in Humpback activity. Our Humpbacks come from Hawaii, Mexico and Central American breeding grounds and they travel through our waters every summer to feed. Every Humpback has a unique personality, and depending on where mom taught them to go to find food the whales have preferred feeding areas and that can change from year to year. Some whales never swim through the Salish sea and some never leave it for feeding season. However, without fail, every fall we see an increase in whales as they slowly move south, feeding on those last minute meals before gathering south of Vancouver Island and heading back to the tropics.

This often means that we start seeing new faces in September and onward, and we see more of our whales. It’s not uncommon to start seeing more and larger groups, but we also still have our whales that prefer their alone time.

Our morning tour got to hang out with our Humpback Windy. Windy is a large whale, who earned their name by farting at boats! Windy was hanging out in the northern part of our range near Lasqueti Island, making those important deep dives to fill their stomach with as much as 3000 lbs of food every day! Windy decided to give our boats a special treat this day, giving our boats a close pass and cartwheeling their tail high out of the water and pooping at the same time!

In the afternoon we encountered 3 separate groups of whales, totalling 8 humpbacks! We started off with Zephyr and her 8 month old calf off Valdez Island in the Strait of Georgia. The Calf decided they wanted to inspect our boat and gave us a close pass. Calves are often very curious, and with mom’s permission (or when she’s not looking) will sometimes come close to the boats to inspect them.

After time with our mom and calf pair, we found 2 other pairs traveling pretty close together. Niagra and Nuage were traveling and feeding with Olympus and Split fin traveling near by. Humpbacks will sometimes travel together to large bait balls in order to work together to feed, which can help in concentrating the food into tighter balls and allowing each whale to capture more food during their dives.

We also found another pair of unknown whales who were feeding and doing deep dives, but also doing a good job of hiding those tails making it harder for us to ID them. Sometimes it feels like some whales get very camera shy and don’t like showing off their tails when there is an audience!

Below are some photos taken by our Naturalists on the tours today.

September 1st - A "Windy" morning and Humpback soup in the afternoon!

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