Saturday, July 28

This morning, we toured the coastline of San Juan Island in search of our southern resident orcas. Our journey took us along the west coast of the island from False Bay to the Cattle Point lighthouse. We took the time for some wonderful wildlife viewing at Whale Rocks, a fantastic area to view harbour seals and a variety of seabirds. Today, we were fortunate to see a majestic bald eagle that was unfortunately being harassed by a glaucous-winged gull. The brave gull was lucky as we have seen unfortunate gulls in the talons of eagles before! We saw several dozen harbour seals including a very cute mother and pup who were swimming near our boat. The next stop in our tour took us to Hein Bank, a favourite dining locale for many cetacean species. Here we saw a couple of minke whales, and had some excellent passes with these amazing baleen whales.

This afternoon we headed to the waters off of Dungeness Spit to view two magnificent humpback whales. We watched as the two whales slowly travelled west, and were fortunate to see one of the two humpbacks show us its tail flukes, and we were able to identify it as one of the same whales we have seen in the same area over the past couple of weeks. On the way back towards Victoria, we received word of another pair of humpback whales. We spent some time with one of them as it swam slowly towards Hein Bank. It was a lovely afternoon on the Salish Sea.