It was a wonderful morning with lots of whales close by! We headed out of the Nanaimo Harbour to start a fresh search, like we do every day and headed out towards the Strait of Georgia. As we travelled these lovely open waters, we quickly spotted something in the distance, blows! Heading over in their direction and seeing some dark knobby bodies slowly surfacing out of the waves we knew what it was…Humpbacks!

We can identify our humpbacks using the bottom side of their tail flukes, and when one of these two went for a dive, we knew who it was. It was one of our more commonly seen humpbacks in the area, Zig Zag (BCX1193) and her 2023 calf! These two got slightly curious when our vessel approached and came up closer to our vessel than the regulated 200m distance for a cow and calf pair. Luckily it was a short close encounter and they continued on to their travels.

Two other humpback whales appeared while we were out, this time it was two adult whales travelling together: Arial (BCY0767) and Apollo (BCY0862). These two were lifting their tails high out of the water when they went down to dive, making getting these IDs very easy.

After having this encounter with Arial and Apollo, we continued on to what our other boat had found, the T065Bs! The T065Bs are a pod consisting of 4 members:

T065B Chunk ♀ (1993)
T065B1 Birdsall ♂ (2011)
T065B2 Nettle ♂ (2019)
T065B3 (2023)

These orca were found very close to home, just off Snake Island! They were slowly travelling south, heading towards Northumberland Channel. This channel leads down to Dodd Narrows, a beautiful narrow passageway that passes between Joan Point on Vancouver Island, and Mudge Island. This passageway is only about 80m across! This narrowness leads to high currents as the tide changes, since a large volume of water passes in this small area. Think of it as putting your thumb over a garden hose! It wasn’t until the afternoon tour that we saw them actually make it down into Dodd where they played around in the current for a little while before turning back north and heading back out of Northumberland Channel.

Leaving the T065Bs, we headed over to Gabriola Island at the Gabriola Bluffs to get one last look at wildlife, with the Bald Eagles on the cliff side, and the cormorants nesting in the cliffs themselves. What a wonderful morning!

Lucky for us, we got to do it all again in the afternoon! Heading over to where we thought the T065Bs were for the afternoon, we got distracted along the way by blows! It was another humpback whale! This time it was Nuage/Beak (BCX1606)! Nuage was travelling in the Strait of Georgia, coming up in every direction all around the Halibut Bank area. This likely means that he was feeding! When feeding there is a lot more maneuvering that happens under the surface, meaning they might not follow the straight line that they will when they are travelling. Although making it slightly less predictable, it also means they aren’t going to be travelling very far between surfaces.

Nuage/Beak has been lovely to watch lately as he has been one of our “high flukers” meaning when he is going for deeper dives he is showing off the underside of his tail a lot, making ID very easy! You can see some of the photos of his lovely tail flukes below.

After our time was spent with Beak/Nuage we continued to the T065Bs again. As mentioned above, we saw them travelling towards Dodd Narrows. After they entered and turned they lead us all the way back up to the Gabriola Bluffs once more where we left them to check out the wildlife that calls those bluffs home. From there it was just a quick jump back across Northumberland Channel to return to the docks.

It’s not every day that we get to have double species in both the morning and afternoon tours, so we felt extra lucky today! All of the photos from the day can be viewed below, and were taken by the onboard marine Naturalists Carmen Murphy and Vanessa Vereschahen.

July 28, 2023 - Humpback soup and the T065Bs

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