Although most days our boats that leave at the same time will see the same whales, today was one of the rare days were this wasn’t true!

We had two vessels out during the trip on August 26th. Both left the harbour with reports of blows seen off of Neck Point Park in Nanaimo. Our boats spread out to see if they could find the source of those blows! Our open boat was the first to make contact with a humpback whale, Sherwina. Sherwina has been spending a lot of time in the waters close to Nanaimo. Today we found her travelling north near Snake Island. As the one boat watched her our other boat found another two travelling nearby. Soon after finding these two, they started to get active! They did a tail slap and started pec slapping. Since our boats are always in communication the open boat watching Sherwina, and seeing the splashes with the other boat, prepared to leave the single whale behind, when suddenly, She jumped out of the water! After the breach she also started doing tail lobs and slaps as the guests watched in awe.

The two groups of whales continued to play around in the water for some time before our boats had to leave them. Further south another group of whales was found, with 5 different whales travelling together! We knew that there were a lot of whales there, but most of them were too interested in playing with eachother than diving so we only managed to get IDs off the two that had distinct dorsal fins: Graze and Merlin. Both of these whales have scars on their dorsals which make them very easy to ID.

It was amazing getting to see all of these humpback whales so close to home! We also got to see some harbour seals, cormorants, and played in the currents which were running close to 10 knots at Dodd Narrows!

It was an amazing day! Please enjoy all the photos taken during the trip by our naturalists Janine Van Der Linden and Aly Kohlman!