Sadly, our season is starting to wind down pretty quick now, with only 3 tours this week. We saw whales on all 3 tours, orcas on all 3, and humpbacks on Wednesday’s tour.
We had encounters with T049C, T123, and T137 families of orca whales this week. I think the most memorable encounter of the week was with T049C on Wednesday’s tour. We were in the midst of a great encounter with a humpback whale, in the fog, when we overheard a report of a lone male killer whale nearby. Because it was so foggy, I wasn’t hopeful we would be able to locate this lone killer whale but decided to give it a shot. We left our humpback whale and drove to the vicinity of the report of the whale and guessed on where we thought he might be heading towards. We drove around for several minutes looking around without any luck, but then naturalist Faith, pointed and exclaimed “dorsal fin!” Out of the dense fog appeared this HUGE male killer whale, T049C “Nielson.” We were so excited we found him, and we had a great encounter with him as we got to watch him hunt seals in the kelp beds nearby.
We had some great weather over the weekend and had some great encounters with the T123 and T137 families of killer whales on Friday and Saturday’s tours, respectively. Awesome weekend for whale watch tours, we still have several more tours left on our schedule through the end of October, and we’d love to see you soon!