Saturday, April 18th

It was an amazingly calm afternoon as Captain Brad and naturalist Corey headed out on the Orca Spirit with an excited group of tourists on our first trip of the season. With a large number of transient orca sightings recently, we decided to head to some of heir usual hunting grounds to see what we could find. Our first stop was the Chain Islets where we stopped to view harbour seals hauled out on the low tide. After educating our guests about these wonderful little marine mammals, we travelled to Trial Island to view the lighthouse and also saw our first bald eagle of the trip. We then travelled on a south-western arc across the Victoria waterfront deep into Juan de Fuca Strait. Along the way we spotted several harbour porpoise, our smallest and most common cetacean. Eventually we made our way to Whirl Bay where we spotted another bald eagle and an old nest! Our final stop and the most exciting part of the trip for our guests was Race Rocks Ecological Reserve. Here we saw four different species of marine mammals: both Steller and California sea lions, harbour seals and the absolutely massive elephant seal. Although we saw no orca this trip, it was a wonderful afternoon on the Salish Sea.