||| FROM CENTER FOR WHALE RESEARCH |||
Full Encounter Report
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ObservBegin: 02:41 PM ObservEnd: 03:22 PM Vessel: Mike 1 Staff: Mark Malleson Pods: Bigg’s killer whales IDsEncountered: T046B1, T046B1A, T046B1C, T046C2 LocationDescr: Southwest of Race Rocks/offshore Becher Bay |
| EncSummary: Mark and Fin headed out to survey the Juan de Fuca Strait as conditions were stellar with no wind and low swell. Leaving Victoria Harbour at 0800, Mark decided to head toward Race Passage and out along the Vancouver Island shoreline, until coming across the dense sport fishing fleet at Beechey Head. He worked outside the fleet from there, travelling around a mile offshore as he continued west.
Stopping for a binocular scan offshore of Sooke, he could see a couple of backlit humpback blows back to the east that he had missed south west of Race Rocks. After several minutes of scanning, he was confident that he hadn’t missed any killer whales and continued west toward Sheringham Point. Several spread-out humpbacks were just south of the lighthouse there, and after another binocular scan, he could see many blows well to the south, near Pillar Point on the American side of the Strait. Mark was fairly confident that they were all humpbacks but felt it was worth investigating to make sure there weren’t some killer whales mixed in. Once he was within a couple of miles of the blows, he could see that it was indeed a huge aggregation of humpbacks. He estimated between 40 and 60 individuals within a square mile! After spending close to two hours collecting fluke identification shots of this large aggregation of individuals, Mark decided to survey a bit further west. He came across several more humpbacks in the middle of the Strait a few miles to the west but much more spread out than the ones off of Pillar Point. The swell was starting to build, and he received a shore-based report that a group of killer whales had been seen heading east offshore of East Sooke Park, so it was time to turn back east. These killer whales had likely been just west of him earlier in the day when he had turned south from Sheringham to investigate the large number of blows near Pillar Point. No matter, he would get them on his way home. He came across a spread-out group of four animals at 1441, a little less than two nautical miles southwest of Beechey Head, and was able to immediately identify them as the T046B1s with T046C2. This group has been spending a lot of time in the Juan de Fuca Strait recently, as has the extended family, the T046Bs. Mark ended the encounter within 40 minutes, having collected decent proof of presence photos of all four individuals and observed no predation. On his way back to Victoria, he heard the T046Bs had been spotted by a commercial whale watch vessel just a couple miles southwest of the T046B1s – who were now well south of Race Rocks – also traveling .east View our on-the-water encounters with Orcas |
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