It was a beautiful day out on the water and we caught up to a lone humpback right outside the Victoria Harbour. It was traveling Eastward towards Clover Point Park.

At first the humpback wasn’t overly active, doing deep dives and barely lifting its tail out of the water.

While we were waiting for the whale to come up from a dive on our starboard side, something massive showed up on our port side, it was the humpback tail throwing!

It scared everyone on the boat as it popped up right between us and another boat who were not expecting it to appear there. It did a quick surface between the boats and then dove underneath us before reappearing on the other side.

The humpback turned and started to head back towards Sooke and we started to follow it until we started to hear blows from behind us.

Members of J Pod made the move in along the Victoria shoreline to the San Juan Islands. They were cruising along in a rush to their next destination, it looked to be the J22s and J11s heading in.

After passing the Discovery Islands, they started to swim next to a cargo ship. It put into perspective how large these ships are compared to the whales and how much of a threat they are to them.


The whales started to pick up the pace and started to tail slap a little after passing the cargo ship and after that they started to porpoise across the strait.

We stopped following about half way to the San Juan Islands and turned back to Victoria.

-Skylar
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