Friday 18th July

Seek and you shall find!

The morning trip headed out on the Orca Spirit with Captain Rick and marine naturalist Tim. We knew the Southern Residents were in the area as we had been with them the night before, but where exactly we didn’t know and so the search was on. We headed east across to San Juan Island and then hugged the coastline and headed south, going all the way down to Iceberg Pt at Lopez Island, hoping to head off any orcas that may be heading north. On our search we stopped off at Whale Rocks to view a bald eagle, harbour porpoises, and an abundance of harbour seals hauled out on the rock. I’m not exaggerating when I say there were at least 40 seals all next to each other, with quite a few pups in amongst their mothers. It is pupping season after all so it was great to see some pups hanging out with mum, even if it’s only for a few weeks! We then headed across to Hein Bank in the search of minke whales. After searching and searching without so much as a ripple in the water, we spotted a minke! Then another! Two minke whales in less than two minutes! Awesome! Although they were “Slinky Minkes” for the most part, passengers were really lucky to get these rorquals surfacing a few times within 100m! To get a photo of a minke is a rare thing, but we had a couple of passengers that were quick on the camera trigger and got some! On our way back to Victoria a passenger yelled out “whale!”, and sure enough, we had another minke! Fantastic! Again we got a couple of close surfacings before it headed in a southerly direction. Now folks, to put this in to perspective, there are around 8 or 9 resident minke whales in these waters during the summer months, and this morning we saw about a third of the population. What a treat!

The afternoon trip headed out with a report of Transients (mammal-eating orcas) out west but inbound so Rick, Tim and Corey headed out to see this small pod of top oceanic predators. We navigated out way into Washington State waters around 15-20 miles west of Port Angeles and came across a group of 5 transient orcas. It was the big male T44, the female T41 and 3 other individuals that appeared to be her offspring. As we arrived on scene we saw a huge splash from one of the orcas. Was it hunting a porpoise? They went down for a while so maybe they had made the kill underwater… we’ll never know. We paralleled these animals for a while then next thing we knew they had changed direction underwater and surfaced very close to the Orca Spirit. It was unbelievable! Passengers hearts were racing as these graceful predators passed us by. Sometimes you just get lucky, and we got extremely lucky this afternoon. On our trek back to Victoria we stopped off at Race Rocks and checked out the ‘orca-derves’ (aka harbour seals) hauled out on the rocks as the racing currents of this marine ecological reserve rushed past them. What a fantastic day to go whale watching. Check out below some pictures of the trip from this afternoon. Enjoy!