The water was calm as our boat Kula headed out to find whales. We traveled through Dodd’s Narrows, watching the currents pulling the water through the channel and traveled through the Gulf Islands all the way down to Porlier Pass. After leaving Porlier we traveled a little ways out towards the middle of the Strait where we found our first pair of whales.

Fader and Big Mamma were slowly moving through the water, doing short dives with lots of surface time. Big Mamma is one of our Northern whales, who tends to spend most of her time up near the Campbell River area. While we hung out with Big Mamma and Fader, a third whale appeared, at first out ahead of us, but slowly made their way towards our boat as Fader and Big Mamma slowly moved south. This third whale finally caught up to us, surprising us with how close she was. We shut our boats down and watched as this huge whale swam circles around us. With one lift of the tail we quickly realized this was Anvil. Anvil is a Z whale, meaning their ail is almost entirely white, but she does have a few distinct markings in the white that help us ID her. Anvil is known to be curious about boats, and while she never came too close, she was close enough to show everyone on board just how big she was.

Once Anvil gave us some space we fired up the motors and headed out to catch up to 2 whales we had seen earlier that were just slightly south of us. We were able to ID this group as Split Fin and Lucky. We didn’t spend much time with them, because as we got close enough to ID them, we turned around to see Fader and Big Mamma had started to breech! Once, Twice, Three times! We turned around and slowly headed back to our first pair, they were only about 800 m away from where we had been so, really, Anvil, big Mamma, Fader, Split Fin and Lucky were all within a few hundred meters of each other.

We repositioned ourselves to watch as Big Mamma and Fader splashed about, throwing their tails in the air in dramatic cartwheels, synchronized pec slapping and high tail lobs and tail slaps.

After we finished our time with our whales we waved farewell to them and made our way towards Gabriola Island where we spent some time with Stellar Sea Lions and some Harbour Seals before continuing back to the Nanaimo Harbour.

Here are some photos taken by Marine Naturalist Rebeka Pirker and Captain Val Watson on todays exciting tour.

Big Mamma (left) Fader (right)Photo by Rebeka Pirker

look at all those barnacle scars. Photo by Val Watson

Doing the backstroke! Photo by Val Watson

September 9th - 5 beautiful Humpbacks Anvil, Fader and Big Mama, Split Fin and Lucky.

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