With calm waters, high hopes, and a nearly full boat, our adventure started by heading out into the open waters of the Strait of Georgia. Based on a earlier report, we started heading to the east side of the strait, since a pod of orca had been seen off of a BC ferry in the morning. While we were heading that direction, we got word from another one of the local whale watching boats departing from Vancouver that they had found them!

We headed over to the other vessel, and quickly saw the big, black, dorsal fins cutting through the calm waters. These dorsal fins were of a very recognizable pod: The T137s!

T137 Loon ♀ (~1984)
T137A Jack ♂ (2002)
T137B Tempest ♀ (2006)
T137D Wright ♀ (2012)

Each member of this pod has some sort of distinguishing feature. Matriarch Loon has a big notch just under the halfway point of her dorsal fin, Jack has two deep notches on his dorsal fin, and Wright has a huge notch about a third of the way down her dorsal fin. What’s distinct about Tempest you ask? Well, she’s the only one without a notch in this family making her unique!

Today we found this family spread out quite far, with Loon and Tempest in the distance, and Jack and Wright closer to us. Soon after we got there, Jack and Wright sprung into action! It seemed that an unlucky Harbour Porpoise got in the path of these two and they took the opportunity to hunt! It’s not very often that we get a super clear view of the prey that the whales are on, but in this case, when Jack came to the surface with it in his mouth, it was unmistakable!

Porpoises can be some of the toughest prey for orca due to their speed and maneuverability, but it didn’t seem that they had any issues today, they found it, killed it, and it seemed that Jack and Wright shared their meal while the other two might have had their own meal in the distance.

Usually, the whole pod would come together to share in the meal, and since Loon and Tempest stuck further away and started splashing around at the same time, we figured they had their own hunt going on. But with the excitement of these two, we didn’t mind not getting great views of the other two!

After spending time with the whales, it was time to head back across the Strait, back to our side of the pond. We made a stop at Stinky Rocks, a Steller Sea Lion haul-out location to get a look at these huge, charismatic animals. As they fought among themselves, we noticed something else. There was a group of Bald Eagles also having a feast on this island! Whatever was on the island that they were eating was just on the other side of the curve of the island so we couldn’t see it clearly, but it was obvious it was a mammal of some kind from looking at the guts. This means this blog once again gets a Content Warning for gore.

Although bald eagles are typically fishing eagles, they are also scavengers, so it’s most likely that whatever they had had already died and they were just taking advantage of the free food!

Our final stop along the way was to see the smaller pinniped species, the Harbour Seal! These cute little guys were hauled out and sharing their rocky outcrop with some shorebirds! It was a very cute end to the tour.

All of the photos from today were taken by the onboard Marine Naturalist Vanessa Vereschehen and can be enjoyed below!