It was just one boat off the dock for our afternoon trip today, our open boat guests bundled up in their anti-exposure suits and ready for adventure! We headed out and started our search for whales in the Strait of Georgia. We planned to head towards the “humpback soup” found during the morning trip.

But first, we made a stop at Stinky Rocks to see some pinnipeds! The first sight we were greeted by was of the small but mighty Harbour Seals. These are the most abundant Marine mammals in the area, and they are also very predictable, not typically travelling further than 15 miles from their favourite haul-out spot and returning to the same area each time to rest. They are also in the area year-round, not leaving like the Sea Lions during breeding season. Harbour Seals will breed, birth, and nurse in the exact same area. And it’s that time of year! We ended up not only seeing the adult Harbour Seals today but also a couple of pups in the mix. Moving further south along Stinky, we smelled, heard, and eventually saw our next group of pinnipeds: the Steller Sea Lions! These ones are much larger than the Harbour Seals and also much louder. They will growl and groan at each other, fighting for the best place on the rock, or maybe just telling the others off if they end up coming too close to where one was resting. Typically, we would see these sea lions migrating away for the summer, yet they are still here in pretty large numbers. We aren’t complaining too much about them sticking around though, as watching them is very entertaining!

Eventually, we continued our search and headed in the direction of the whales from this morning. Sure enough, as we approached the area we started to see the big bushy blows of the humpback whales in the distance! We chose a group of blows and went over to see who it was that we would be seeing this afternoon.

The first group of whales was 3 travelling together, circling in the area, likely feeding beneath the surface. Lucky for us, feeding in the depths of the water column usually requires more effort in the dive and that’s when you see the humpback whales lifting their tails up and out of the water. Since the best way to identify our whales is by looking at the underside of their tail flukes, we were very happy! It made it somewhat easy to identify these three as Hendrix (BCY1276), Olympus (BCX2075), and Watson (BCX1068calf2021) travelling together.

Although the humpbacks are very, very large (weighing up to 40 tons) they are eating very, very small animals! They are just eating a ton of it. Literally! Each day a full-grown humpback whale will need to consume about a ton of food, and with Krill, one of the main things they eat, weighing about one gram each, it means they might eat up to 1,000,000 organisms in a day! If they are eating small schooling fish which are much larger, at closer to 25 grams, they might only eat 40,000 fish in a day. Can you believe that! So collectively, these three whales might be eating a combined 4 million animals a day!

The way that they accomplish this amazing feat is with their big mouths. They have pleats along the ventral side of their body which are soft and open up to increase the volume that their mouth can take, up to about 20,000 litres. If you fill your bathtub every day for 6 months, that’s the amount of water they get in each mouthful. They then use the ~400 plates of baleen on their upper jaw to filter out all the yummy treats from in this water. They do this for about 80% or more of their day, with the other 20% being resting and socializing. The sheer volume of food that these gentle giants go through every day is absolutely mind-blowing.

We watched these three for a while before we spotted more blows in the distance so we decided to leave these animals to their feeding, and moved over to the next group. We were greeted this time by a pair of humpbacks: Big Mama (BCY0324) and Valiant (BCX1773)! These two humpbacks are both confirmed female now, with Big Mama being famous for the number of calves she’s brought back to the Salish Sea. She was actually the first humpback recorded returning to the area in 1997, and since then she has brought back 7 calves. We are always thrilled to find her in the area during our tours because of her important impact on the humpback population. Valiant hasn’t brought back a calf to our waters yet, but she was confirmed female thanks to a photo showing her hemispherical lobe during a bout of tail slapping earlier in the year. These two also seemed to be feeding in the area, which is a great sign that there is enough food for all of these animals in a small area in the Strait.

Soon, we also left Big Mama and Valiant to their feeding and continued back towards Nanaimo. It was a nice cruise back as the waters were nearly flat calm. We had one more stop in store though, at the Gabriola Bluffs! These bluffs are impressive in themselves, with towering sandstone cliffs stretching hundreds of feet into the air. Where these cliffs meet the water, the soft sandstone is slowly eroding, leaving behind some amazing rock formations. Erosion occurs all along the height of the cliffs in different ways, with different layers of stones being made of slightly different minerals, meaning some layers are slightly more durable than others. When layers erode, it leaves space behind for birds like the Cormorants to come in and nest! These birds are incredible at using what little space they can, building their nests along the cliff edge and raising their chicks there. We got some really great looks at the Cormorants before it was time to return to port. It was an amazing afternoon getting to see so many different whales, as well as all the wildlife. The photos from today were taken by Marine Naturalist Lucy Willis, and can be viewed below!

July 27, 2024, 3:30 pm - A Visit to Humpback Land

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