We went whale watching today out of Richmond with Sea Breeze Adventures. It was awesome. There are tons of humpback whales here feeding right now. We saw lots of reports of Orcas near Vancouver recently. Someone took this cool video of orcas under the Lion's gate bridge. That's awesome.
I did whale watching and bear watching out of Tofino a few years ago and really enjoyed it. I didn't realize black bears come out of the forest when the tide is out to flip rocks and eat crabs and barnacles. That makes them easy to find on a zodiac. I really like the zodiacs for the shorter trips. This one was 3 - 5 hours so I opted for the larger inside outside vessel. Better washroom on board. I'm disabled again and have blown out my other hip so this was very low impact.
They took us out to a tiny island off of Valdes island where there were a ton of juvenile stellar sea lions. There is a similar island off of Tofino where they have the bigger mature ones. The biggest and toughest male sea lion mates with a harem of others. He has to fight off all the other male sea lions for the privilege. It's pretty brutal. On the way back off of Galiano Island we saw several groups of humpback whales surfacing and diving.
I guess they're called humpback whales because of the curvature in their backs
They identify them by the markings on their tails.
They have a whole catalogue of ones they have named and identified since they migrate up here during summer to feed from Mexico and Hawaii.
It's also hard to catch the blow hole spray when they surface on camera.
I was on a zodiac tour out of Lund in Desolation Sound and we saw a humpback whale dive raising his tail in the air. The guide was like, he's gone. This time when we saw them dive we stayed and waited. In about five to seven minutes they would surface again. We only saw one breach in the distance but that's pretty hard to catch on your camera.
In Tofino off of Vargas Island we would see the grey whales surface while we were on kayaks. That's pretty cool. You can find them near the bull kelp because the krill congregate around the bull kelp and the grey whales feed on the krill. It's pretty shallow so they're not breaching just surfacing.
I asked one of the guides what to do if the whale got too close and he said just knock on your kayak and they'll hear you. As soon as I saw one I was all excited then got nervous right away and started knocking on my kayak. Today were were in a large boat so we were much safer.
Today we saw so many groups of humpbacks, the guide said was unusual. They said it was the most they'd seen at one time. We saw one large group then after we left we kept seeing more smaller groups simultaneously on the left and right. It was pretty cool. Sometimes you go whale watching and don't see any. Today was a nice day.
