We were lucky enough to find 7 different humpback whales during our tour on October 14th, a real case of humpback soup!

When we left the harbour we headed over to a humpback hotspot nice and close to home near Entrance Island, and sure enough, there were blows in the distance! We found two humpbacks travelling together here, Fader (BCY0195) and Olympus (BCX1057's 2018 calf). Olympus has been making the rounds in this area for the last few days, being seen with a few different humpbacks during that time. Today these two were doing feeding dives, lifting their tail flukes high into the air before dipping below the surface. There must be a ton of food being produced for them in this area as the humpbacks have been here consistently. We watched as these two went for dives, came to the surface for air a few times, and then continued the pattern over and over.

After our hour with these two was up we continued the search south along Gabriola Island when we soon came across even more humpbacks! This time there was a couple different groups in close proximity to each other. There was a total of 5 whales, in two groups; El Diablo (BCX0132) and BCZ0342 were travelling together, and the other group was Frankenstein (KEX0005) travelling with Kappa (BCX0158) and her 2022 calf.

El Diablo is an interesting whale. She is known to be female from a genetic analysis done in Alaska, but she (as far as we are aware) hasn’t been observed with a calf. She is one of the older whales in the area, being seen since 1993! This makes her at least 29 years old! She spends her winters down in Hawaii and splits her summers between the waters off of BC and Alaska. Interestingly, she was seen up in Alaska off of Chichagof Island on August 29th of this year, meaning she might only be here as a pit stop on her migration back south to Hawaii. Since El Diablo is a fully grown adult female she is as big as humpbacks can get! The female humpbacks get slightly larger than the males of the species, so she could be about 17m long and weigh close to 35 tonnes! The whale that she was travelling with today doesn't have as much information known about them. We don’t know where they go for winter or their gender, but we know that they are at least 18 years old, given when they were first sighted.

Kappa is another older female. Her first sighting was in 1997, meaning she is at least 25 years old! She is likely also fully grown, and you can get an idea of how big she is when she surfaces next to her calf. When calves are first born they are still about 4 meters long and weigh a ton (literally)! By now, since we are getting to the end of the calf’s first year, it should have nearly doubled in size! The mother’s milk is very rich in fat providing a lot of energy to the calf for growth, and sometimes for surface activity! Today the calf was making use of this energy doing tail lobs and slaps beside their mother.

Frankenstein was also travelling nearby. He is a known male, who’s first sighting (that we know of) was in 2013. Frankenstein also winters down in Hawaii interestingly. The other possible breeding ground for our population of humpbacks would be down in Mexico. As mentioned before the males don’t get as large as the female humpbacks, and will only get to be about 15 meters in length (so still very big).

Getting to see this many humpbacks during a tour is an amazing experience, especially considering it wasn’t to long ago that they were considered to be extirpated from the area (locally extinct). Each year we have had more and more humpback sightings, with just our company having confirmed 86 individual humpbacks during our tours this year! We can’t wait to see how much the population grows in the future.

Our onboard naturalists Janine and Vanessa got some amazing photos from the day which you can view below!