Heading out of the harbour we decided to make our way over to a humpback named Nuage / Beak BC1606. When we first pulled up he was doing slow surfaces. It’s likely he was sleeping when upon arrival. It can be difficult to tell whether a whale is resting or not because unlike humans they only rest half their brain at a time. They can’t fully shut down their brain like us because they need to consciously take every breath throughout their lifetime.

It didn’t take long for Beak to wake up and when a humpback wakes up, they usually do it in style! Beak began to breach several times and this was followed by several chin slaps. Each breach Beak did takes roughly 600 calories to accomplish, so you can imagine it’s a real treat when we get to see 40 tons fly through the air.

Just like most of us when we wake up from a good sleep, humpbacks sometimes need to go to the toilet. Although unlike us, for humpbacks the ocean is their toilet. For several minutes Beak could be scene eliminating waste at the surface of the water. Humpback poop is extremely important for our ocean environment and contributes to the great circle of life. The phytoplankton feeds off the nitrogen in humpback feces, krill feed on phytoplankton and humpbacks eat krill.

Once we left Beak we were fortunate enough to come upon Snoopy BCY0770 and Bullet BCX1658 who were doing more typical humpback behavior. They seemed more interested in filling their bellies full of yummy krill than breaching which is perfectly fine with us because when our humpbacks migrate back here from their breeding grounds they are hungry! Humpbacks eat between 3000-5000 pounds of food daily when they are in the Salish Sea, that’s a lot of food!

On our way back to the harbour we were given the heads up that there were possible orca along the ferry line and decided to see if we could find them. We did, but rather multiple orca like we are used to finding, we found 1 single juvenile. This can only mean one thing, we found Mr. Indy-pendent himself, T65A5 Indy.

Indy T065A5 ♂ (2014)

Transient orca males typically spend their whole lives with mom, but not Indy. Indy has been on his own for several years now which is especially surprising because he is only 9 and mentally a 9 year old orca is similar to a 9 year old human. Despite this, he seems to be thriving on his own and just like any kid, he absolutely loves to play. It’s an extremely rare day for us to have both breaching humpback and breaching orca but Indy made that happen today!

We captured some amazing photos from the day taken by Naturalists Aly Kohlman and Vanessa Vereschahen, which can all be viewed below.