Our staff’s favourite time of year is when the Humpback soup returns to our Nanaimo shores. Every year there is a period of several weeks where dozens of humpbacks can be found within minutes of leaving the Nanaimo harbour. Typically we see the soup start in July, however, this year it seems to be arriving a little later than normal.
On the 25th we left the harbour with a few reports of whales nearby, and we were incredibly excited to see just how many there were!

In the morning we had 2 separate groups of humpbacks, the first was Merlin travelling with Corona and her calf. Merlin is a new whale for us to encounter, and our first time seeing him was when he was travelling with Divot down in Washington. Since then he’s made his way up to Nanaimo and is now making plenty of friends here.
Our second group of the morning was Graphite, the 2019 calf of Divot, Fader a male known to frequent Hawaii in the winters, and Sherwina, of course. This group was pretty excited today and was very curious about the boats.

For the afternoon tour, we found a bunch more humpbacks in the same area as the morning trip. Some had left their friends from the morning and others had formed new groups who were having a great time.

The first humpback we came across was a lone whale, Honu, travelling north along Valdez Island. Honu was doing normal humpback behaviour, surfacing a few times to breathe and then lifting her beautiful tail out of the water to propel herself down for a feeding dive. Since our humpbacks are in our waters to feed this is the most common behaviour that we see during our tours. A mile or so in the distance we spotted another set of blows! We left Honu behind to find these other two who were a couple from this morning, Fader and Sherwina still travelling together. We watched as they travelled north and they slowly started to spread apart. When one of our other boats let us know that there was another active humpback party happening not too far away we decided to leave Fader and Sherwina to their travels and instead watch Graphite now with Raptor and Olympus, with Trooper hanging out nearby. These whales were again curious about our vessels so we sat there with our engines off and got to watch them interacting with each other. We also had a surprise visit from a large National Geographic Cruise ship that also slowed their cruise to watch the whales.

Not only did we get to see very exciting whales today, but we also saw seals, sea lions and lots of sea birds!

Below are some of the best photos taken by marine naturalists Carmen Murphy, Vanessa Vereschahen, and Janine Van Der Linden.