Our afternoon departure on June 1st was a little bit special, we had a shorter private charter that headed back up to humpback land and our public tour went to chase a report of Orca over near Vancouver.

Let’s start with the charter! They headed north, hoping to pick up those humpbacks that have been in the area. We not only found them again, but they had some new friends hanging out with them! We saw a total of 5 humpbacks in the afternoon: BCX1606 Nuage/Beak, BCX1705 Ocular, KEY0040 Scuba, BCY1107 Dandelion, and an unknown.

One of these whales was taking a break from feeding and decided it was time to use up some of that energy! It was a combination of tail slapping, fluking, and one even pooped while we were watching them! Since the charter only had a couple of hours to spend on the water, they left eh humpback party and headed to see some sea lions before returning to the dock. What a day! Photos from this tour were taken by Vanessa Vereschahen.

Let’s talk about the public tour now! As mentioned, they ended up heading for a report of orca that was close to Vancouver, on the other side of the Strait from us. We headed in that direction, going through Northumberland, into Dodd Narrows, through Gabriola Pass, and across the Strait of Georgia. It didn’t take long before we saw the orca that we were hoping for! It was a group of 3 orca travelling together: the T100Bs and a mystery whale travelling with them. The T100Bs are two animals:

T100B Freya ♀ (1997)
T100B1 Seidr (2010)

This mother-child duo aren’t that commonly seen by us, only having two other days of sightings that we can recall, one on May 30, 2021 and once on October 7, 2022.

Today this pod was just travelling east, seemingly on a mission to get somewhere. Soon our time with these orca was up and we decided to start heading home. Just as we decided to leave, we got a single spy hop from the orca, a lovely goodbye!

On the journey back across the strait, we got word of another pod of orca along our path home, so we also stopped to spend some time with them. This pod was the T123s!

T123 Sidney ♀ (~1985)
T123A Stanley ♂ (2000)
T123C Lucky ♀ (2012)
T123D Darcy ♀ (2018)

A favourite amongst whale watchers, this pod has a wide spread of ages and sexes, giving great examples of the size differences between them.

The T123s were a little bit more active than the T100Bs, with tail slapping, and faster travel. We couldn’t spend as long with this group since we were running low on time for the tour, but it was great to see two different groups of orca!

After spending some time with wildlife on the way home, we found ourselves back in the Nanaimo harbour!

The naturalist onboard this tour was Des Poier, and you can see all her photos below!