Wow, what a day! Our adventure started with both our open boats, Keta and Cascadia, heading north up to Parksville, following up on a report of orca in the area. The reports were correct! T049A2 Jude and T065A3 Amira were spotted travelling within Parksville Bay.
Jude and Amira are both 15-year-old boys who are traveling away from their mother’s pods. This isn’t uncommon behaviour for young male orca either. As they hit puberty they usually venture off to explore for a bit before returning to their moms’ side eventually. Orca do not have a breeding season and will often venture away from their family to breed with unrelated females. In this case, the boys are hanging out together, exploring the sea as teenage boys, and we hope will eventually return to their pods. Though, it does happen where males decide to remain away from their matriline and travel solo for the majority of their lives. Jude has been flying solo for several months now, traveling with his aunt, and several unrelated other pods. Last year he also took several months away from the family, at first traveling with his brother Noah, and then with a pair of young orca from another pod, before eventually returning to his mom in the fall.
Today Jude and Amira were putting on a show, or so it felt. In reality, they likely paid no mind to the people watching them as they barrel rolled, pec slapped, tail slapped, back stroked, breached, porpoised and cartwheeled through the water. It’s not often that we see orcas so energetic like this! We even saw them doing something we’d never seen before. We think that Jude and Amira were making waves for fun. Antarctic orcas often use this technique to knock their seal prey off floating ice, but we’ve never seen our transients do anything like this. They seemed to stall in the water, with only an inch of their dorsal visible above the water, as they pushed large amounts of water behind them. They started creating their own wake using their powerful tails! It was quite unusual but very cool to see.

After spending about an hour with Jude and Amira, we headed back down south. It didn’t take long on our journey back south until we spotted humpback whales! Around Craig Bay, at the southern end of Parksville, we were surprised to find Two-Spot and Split Fluke’s 2021 calf. Two more whales were spotted near Ballenas Islands, though there wasn’t enough time to stay and get photos of their flukes to see who they were. So many whales and so little time!

Heading further south to Snake Island, our vessel Cascadia spotted some Harbour seals, as well as, some oystercatchers and a bald eagle.

Photos this morning were taken by Naturalists Rebeka and Janine.