It was another beautiful day on the Salish Sea when we travelled down through the Southern Gulf Islands towards a report of a humpback whale. Once we reached the west side of Pender Island we found KEX0019 Ocular! Ocular was doing long feeding dives, looking for food around Pender Islands Coast.

Along with the rest of our humpbacks who have just returned, Ocular is busy building up their fat stores for the fall migration. They only just arrived in our waters but already need to begin preparing for the return trip in the fall. Humpbacks rely on the fat deposits they build up here in the Salish Sea to get them through the migration to the breeding grounds and back again. Eating up to 3000 lbs of food a day is not an easy task, but a necessary one, to make sure they get nice and fat.

After visiting our humpback we began the trip back to Nanaimo through Sansum Narrows and came across a pod of Orca. This was the T041’s, Lawrie (<56 years old) the matriarch was travelling a bit behind her daughter T041A Jemison (34) and her grandkids T041A2 (9) Tree and T041A3 (4).
These 4 whales are not common visitors here, in fact, we aren’t sure we’ve ever seen this pod before. Their sightings data shows they spend most of their time around the southern end of Victoria and up the west side of Vancouver Island.
They were on a mission today, heading north through the channels.

Before our morning tour we had a visit from our local River otters who were right outside our office. We managed to get some photos of them playing on the docks.