It was a beautiful sunny day as guests boarded Cascadia, our open zodiac-style boat, and prepared to set sail in search of whales.
We travelled out towards Entrance Island, where all our humpbacks have been hanging out as of late. This proved to be a good call and the humpbacks didn’t disappoint. We found our first whale only 20 minutes after leaving the docks. It was BCX1856 Honu! According to Happy Whale, Honu made their first appearance in the Salish Sea in 2018 and has been back every year since. Honu seems to spend quite a lot of time in the San Juan islands and near Sooke but may have found some new favourite late-summer, early-fall feeding spots up in our neck of the woods, or sea rather.
Honu has a beautiful and distinct fluke, with striking white spots and a beautiful little “cross” scar on the edge of their right fluke. Honu was doing some long dives after her fluking, and as humpbacks do, they surprised us with a single breach, just what every whale watcher hopes for! Breaching is a cool behaviour to be able to witness, but we still aren’t entirely sure why they do it! There are some leading theories right now, Removing parasites, communication, and displays of excitement are some of the current theories as to why humpbacks breach.
Without hands to scratch their backs, or dexterous fingers to pick barnacles and ticks off their skin, a good breach will have to suffice! When you weigh up to 40 tons (80,000 lbs!) there’s a lot of force generated when you jump into the sky! The impact from hitting the water is enough to knock barnacles and ticks loose and give them a good back scratch in the process.
When you hit the water that hard it also generates a lot of noise! These sound waves can travel quite a distance and maybe a way of communicating over long distances.
The last one is pretty obvious, a display of excitement! If you’re happy and you know it, try to fly! Isn’t that how the song goes? When you’ve been searching for the perfect meal, or maybe you’ve just finished it, sometimes you need to jump around to show the world how happy you are. We often see this in calves, who aren’t foraging for their own food but rather still relying on mom for milk. This means they don’t have as much care about expending extra energy.
Whatever the reason a humpback has for breaching it’s important to remember how much energy these whales use to launch themselves skyward. when you weigh 40 tons and you’re trying to get fat, exercising isn’t usually the way you wanna do it. It takes only 8 seconds for a whale to breach, but in that 8 seconds, they spend as much energy as you would if you ran a full marathon! That’s a lot of energy. We are always amazed, and thankful when they do breach for us,

Nearby was another humpback who was milling about. We stopped in briefly to see who they were, but the little whale seemed tired. They may have had a big breakfast, as they weren’t keen to lift that tail for us, and then they seemed to tuck in for an afternoon nap! We did get dorsal fin photos, and this little whale is pretty scratched up, so you would think it would be an easy match. However, it doesn’t appear that this little one is in any of our catalogues. If they are, they’ve gone through quite the change! We are hoping to re-encounter them soon, and hopefully get a bit luckier with a tail photo, so we can hopefully match them up. For now, they will remain a mystery whale!

We encountered a third whale, just a little bit further north than Honu and our little mystery whale. This whale was also a mystery whale only 3 days ago! We first encountered them a bit further south and only managed to get dorsal fin photos. On the 20th they were travelling with Nike and finally showed off their beautiful fluke, just enough for us to get a match! It was BCZuk2021#1, Quadrata! Quadrata has a gorgeous tail with some very unique markings, and now that we know what to look for they are fairly easy to ID. This little one is likely only 2 or 3 years old, but having only been seen for the first time on 2021, travelling alone, we aren’t certain how old they are, and we likely will never know. We also don’t know yet where they winter, but we look forward to more encounters with this little whale. Just like Honu, they gave us one quick breach before returning to their regular feeding pattern.

After our time with the whales, we cruised around looking for harbour seals and sea lions before we returned to the harbour. Enjoy the photos of our wildlife taken by marine naturalist Janine Van Der Linden.

September 21st - Honu, a mystery humpback, and Quadrata off of Gabriola

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