September 22, 2006

Wow – what an excellent morning! Our 9 am Orca Spirit tours went out with a full load of eager whale watchers and we did not disappoint! As we came out of the harbour we had a choice of what whales to go and see. We decided to look for the transient orcas that were just around the southern tip of Vancouver Island. We found them with no problems and had a terrific show. There were 4 orcas in total including a small calf who drew "awwwwws" from our group. After that we had a short two minute boat ride to go and visit two Humpback whales that were on the south side of Race Rocks. As we were watching the humpbacks we could see the transients splashing around in the distance, so we went over to investigate. It turns out they were hunting a Harbour seal - the seal managed to evade the whales by jumping onto the engine platform of one of the zodiac boats in the area. The whales circled for a bit and then gave up. Phew! Lucky Harbour seal! After all this action, we decided to slow things down by taking a look at the seals and sea lions over at Race Rocks. The sea lions were as entertaining as ever! Hard to beat this trip!

As hard as our 9am was supposed to be to beat, we had an excellent 1pm trip as well! We came out of the harbour and headed straight for the transient orcas. We had an excellent viewing opportunity and after about 10 minutes we found the humpacks from this morning in front of the transients (about 200 - 400 m)! As it turns out the transients avoided the humpbacks all together. That left us with our knobby nosed friends and they put on an excellent show. After one particularly long deep dive, we were sitting waiting for them to surface with our engines off, and both the humpback whales surfaced near our vessel and we became very aware of how big they really are!! After our fantastic humpback visit we went off to look for the transient orcas again. We then went to visit the sea lions and seals at Race Rocks. Because it was getting nearer to high tide, there were many sea lions swimming around the rocks and we were delighted by their play in the water. An excellent trip and an excellent day!