We left the dock on the morning of August 22nd and started the search into the Strait of Georgia! We had heard rumours from shore that there was a whale on the East side of Gabriola Island, so we headed that way! All three of our vessels headed over the north end of Gabriola Island and then spread out to cover more area as they went. It was one of the open boats that first spotted the whale in the distance! None of the whales that we watch are tracked in any way, we instead rely on visual tracking starting fresh each day to find our whales.

With the humpback whales, there are two main things that we look for when trying to spot these animals: the blow, and their tails when they go for a dive. For the majority of the time, our whales spend under the surface of the water, making them relatively hard to spot. You have to not only be lucky but be able to figure out what’s a whale in the distance and not just a wave or sailboat tricking us!

One of the best ways to tell the difference between a log and a whale is by waiting for them to breathe. Logs don’t typically do that, so if you see a tall bushy blow coming from what might look like a log in the water, it’s probably a humpback. The trickiest logs are the ones with roots coming out of them since that is basically what an orca looks like on an average surface as well. The main difference is the breathing.

Another thing to look for on the water is the arching back and rising tail that the humpbacks exhibit as they go for a longer dive. The humpbacks themselves are massive, getting to be close to 17m long once fully grown and weighing up to 35 tonnes! These large robust animals put more of that body out of the water when doing a dive like this, which you can see from the photos below.

The boat spotted one of these features and headed over to see who it was. This whale was doing deep feeding dives, meaning that it was spending more time under the water. If they really want to, a humpback whale can hold its breath for 45 minutes! Lucky for us, Squirrel (KEX0066) wasn’t diving that deep today, and was instead only down for about 10 minutes at a time. While under the surface Squirrel would be focused on feeding, taking in huge volumes of water (up to 20,000L) and filtering out the small schooling fish and krill that are unlucky enough to end up inside. This is why the humpbacks are here at all, it’s all about the food. When in our waters the humpbacks will be building their fat reserves up by eating over a ton of food every day. This far is what the humpbacks survive off when they undergo their massive 6000 km journey down south to their breeding grounds. Since the southern waters don’t have as high of productivity and therefore less food for them, feeding only happens very opportunistically. They will slowly metabolize the fat they had built up over the summer here, the ultimate vacation! The humpbacks have the best life, getting to gorge themselves all summer, celebrated by us for getting nice and fat over the summer, and then they get to spend their winters down in Hawaii or Mexico, depending on the whale.

We aren’t sure which of the breeding grounds Squirrel spends their time in, as they haven’t been cross-matched to either of them yet. Interestingly, Squirrel is a whale that was born to a mother who spends her time in the Alaskan feeding grounds, so the fact he ditched her and started returning to BC to feed each year is quite interesting. Typically humpbacks have quite high site fidelity, and calves will return to the same place as their mom after their first migration together, but Squirrel proves this isn’t always the case.

All of the photos of Squirrel and the other wildlife taken by the onboard marine naturalists Carmen Murphy, Cheyenne Brewster, and Ella Hillbrecht can be viewed below!

August 22, 2023, 10:30 - Squirrel swimming in the Salish Sea

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