Our semi-covered boat Kula headed out this afternoon to find some whales. We were rewarded with not one, not two, but four humpback whales! We first came across Pop Tart (BCY1014). Pop Tart was busying herself feeding on her favourite food; krill. However, if there was a large bait ball in the area (a large school of small fish), she wouldn’t have turned it down! We know Pop Tart was feeding due to her slightly longer-than-average dive times. Sometimes while you’re waiting for a humpback on a dive, you can see bubbles on the surface. Bubbles can happen when the humpback filters the water out of its mouth underwater! We stayed for a while with Pop Tart and then went back into search mode.

Today we also spotted Neptune (BCY1021)! Neptune has been a regular occurrence recently. They can be seen solitarily or in a group of other whales. Today they were alone, but very much entertaining themselves. They were rolling around playing in the kelp that had settled itself between the outpouring from the Fraser River and the saltwater of the Strait. Since these two don’t mix very well due to different densities, a lot of the seaweed floating around gets caught here. In the photos below, you can see that the two are even different colours! This is because seawater has a lot of plankton in it, while the Fraser River water has a lot of silt. Neptune seemed to enjoy playing around on the boundary here, and of course with their kelp! They draped it over their pectoral fins and flukes, even poking their nose out of the water.

We try and minimize our impact on the whales by not staying for too long with any group of whales, so after about an hour with Neptune when we decided to leave them to their seaweed.

It wasn’t long before we found Big Mama (BCY0324) and Kraken/Monarch (BCZ0180) travelling together. Big Mama is famous here in the Salish Sea because she was the first to come back into the area after extensive whaling here in British Columbia. An estimated 14,000 humpbacks were taken out of BC waters between the 1860s and 1967. In 1967, humpbacks were protected under the International Whaling Commission (IWC). No one saw a humpback whale here until 1997. 1997 is when Big Mama was first seen, and she’s come back into this area every year since! She breeds and has her calves down in Hawaii, and brought her first calf back here in 2003. Big Mama has since brought six more calves into the Salish Sea from Hawaii, one of those calves being Pop Tart! Kraken (also known as Monarch) was first documented by Happywhale in 2004. We guess these whales are similar in age, so this could be a potential reason why they were seen together!

We would have stayed longer with Big Mama and Kraken, but we were coming to the end of the tour. We said our goodbyes and went over to one of our favourite wildlife spots, Stinky Rocks! This is one of the only places in our range that is still regularly used by Steller Sea Lions. Theoretically, they should all be up in Alaska right now breeding and having their pups. But these guys seem pretty content to stay here, so we’ll enjoy them while we have them! It was also a pretty high tide, so we got to see one of them playing in the waves.

All too soon, we left the sea lions to their rocks and headed home.

All of the photos on this afternoon’s tour were taken by Marine Naturalist Vanessa Vereschahen!