It was a beautiful day as we left the harbour on the 29th, and there were plenty of reports already! We decided to head in the direction of orca, a pod was seen travelling through the Flat Top Islands, to the SE of Gabriola Island. When we got there it turned out to be the T002Cs! This pod has been frequent visitors to the waters around Nanaimo for the last little while with T002C Tasu leading her three kids around. Her kids are T002C1 Rocky, T002C3 Lucy, and T002C5. Today this pod was travelling north getting deeper and deeper into the Strait of Georgia.

After watching the orca we decided to see if one of the other reports from this morning was still around; a humpback whale that was spotted from land off North Nanaimo. We headed that way and spotted the blow in the distance! We had found the humpback! As we got closer more blows appeared. it seemed we actually had three humpbacks in the area. We decided to watch KEY0034 Sherwina and KEX0003 Nike who were travelling close together, towards the end we had the third humpback meet-up with Nike and Sherwina got more distant. Eventually, we had to leave these whales behind and headed back into the harbour.

For the afternoon we decided to try our luck in finding the orca again with one boat while the other went back to where we had the humpback earlier. The boat searching for the whales did a wide loop out into the Straight of Georgia covering the area that the pod of orca could have been based on their direction and speed from the morning. Unfortunately, they didn’t end up finding anything, other than the sea lions which were hauled out on the Halibut Bank ODAS buoy. They eventually looped back around to the humpback whales which the other boat had found and been watching. It was still the same whales from the morning, Nike and a whale we later identified as BCX1965 from our photos, travelling together with Sherwina keeping her distance.

The other boat got to the end of their time with the humpbacks and headed out to see if they would have any luck finding the T002Cs from the morning, doing a wider loop, but again only found those sea lions. No matter, it was a great afternoon spent with three humpback whales in calm conditions.

Please enjoy all the photos from the day taken by our naturalists Aly Kohlman, Carmen Murphy, and Vanessa Vereschahen!