Vancouver Whale Watching Safari
Killer Whale Watching tour from Vancouver in search of Orca whales with free hotel pick-up and free on-board lunch.
2 – 23 participants
The North West Pacific is teaming with sea life including several species of whales and dolphinoids such as. Orcas, Gray whales, Humpback whales, Minke whales, and Dalls porpoises.
Orca’s or Killer whales can be seen from Vancouver between April and October. Gray Whales migrate North from Mexico the Arctic in the spring and return from there in the fall. Minke Whales are seen occasionally throughout the season. Dalls porpoises also frequent the local waters all year round. Humpback whales can be seen in September and October.
Orcas have the largest brain of all mammals. They communicate verbally in dialects and hunt down their prey with cunning and stealth. These intelligent animals visit the North West Pacific coast around Vancouver regularly between April and October in search of salmon.
Come on a Vancouver whale watching tour and admire these magnificent creatures, which have been worshiped by the First Nations, feared by our forefathers, and intrigued scientists.
The actual trip is about 5 hours long. Sighting chances are 85 per cent. Other marine wild life you are likely to encounter include Dall’s Porpoises, seals, sea lions, and bald eagles. On rare occasions Minke whales and sea elephants have been encountered.
You travel protected from the elements in covered, comfortable, high-speed boats equipped with washroom facilities. On-board lunch is provided. You will be back in Vancouver in the afternoon.
Guarantee: Sighting chances are 85 per cent. If you don’t see whales, your next trip is free, but a nominal fee is charged to cover transportation.
| Tour Option 1 – includes hotel pick-up and on-board lunch | |
| Every summer some 80 Orca whales visit the waters south of Vancouver. View these intelligent animals in their natural habitat on a high speed sea safari. You travel in comfortable, covered boats through spectacular West Coast scenery. Other marine wild life you are likely to encounter includes dolphins, seals, sea lions and bald eagles. Sighting chances are 85 per cent. Trained naturalist will explain the eco-system. On-board lunch and hotel pick-up are included. | |
| Dates | Daily between April 1 and October 15 |
| Pick-up |
Major hotels in Vancouver |
| Time | 9:30 am – Apr 1 – Jun 18 7:30 am – Jun 14 – Sep 5 9:30 am – Sep 6 – Oct 31 |
| Duration | 4-7 hours |
| Price/person | Can$175 – adults Can$125 – children (4-12) |
| Inclusions |
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| Minimum |
6 adults |
| What to Bring |
It’s windy – bring jacket, sun-protection, camera & binoculars. |
| Cancellation | up to 7days before the trip – full refund 3 to 6 days before – 50% cancellation fee 2 days or less before – no refund |
| On-board Lunch Menu |
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Orca Whales (Orcinus orca)
Best viewing time: April to October
Killer or Orca whales are not actually whales. They belong to the family of dolphinoids and are the largest member of that species.
Orcas can get up to 32 feet long, with a 6-foot tall dorsal fin, and weigh up to 7 tons. Females can grow up to 28 feet in length, with a 3-foot tall dorsal fin, and weigh up to 6 tons.
Killer whales have black bodies with white bellies, and white patches on their chin and by the eyes. They also have a gray or white saddle behind the dorsal fin.
Killer whales inhabit all oceans, but mostly occur in Arctic and Antarctic waters. They frequent coastal waters along the continental shelf, and can be found along the entire Alaskan coastline, except where pack ice excludes them because of their dorsal fin.
They mate year-round. It’s believed that Orcas, like most dolphins, sometimes have sex for pleasure. Females give birth to a single calf after a gestation period of 13 to 16 months. At birth, the calf measures 8 feet long and weighs 400 pounds. Male Orcas live for 30 to 50 years, and females for 50 to 70. Killer whales live within highly complex social structures. They live in family units called pods. Killer whales hunt communally, swim at speeds up to at least 28 miles per hour, and have 40 to 56 conical, interlocking teeth that curve back toward the throat.
All whales communicate with clicks, whistles and pulsed calls. However, each pod has its own dialect, and resident whales’ sounds are different from those of transient whales. Orcas live in matriarchal societies. Since females live long lives – the oldest local matriarch is 92 years old – these pods often include several generations of whales.
There are three groups of whales. Resident Orcas, Transients, and Off-shore Orcas or Outsiders.
Three pods of Residents with a total of approximately 80 whales spend every summer in these local waters south of Vancouver in search of migrating salmon. Sighting chances are 85 per cent.
The local Residents are the worlds most intensively studied Orca whales and a leading authority is Dr. Paul Spong. Visit his web site and listen to the Orcas sing. Transients have given this species its “killer” reputation. They pray on other sea mammal, including porpoises, seals, sea lions, elephant seals and juvenile gray whales.
Little is known about the family makeup of transient pods, but scientists know a fair amount about their behavior. A pod of 8 – 12 transients roam the area around Vancouver Island but their travel pattern is unpredictable.
Transient orcas are a group of about 300 killer whales that primarily roam the California coast, but extend all the way to Southeast Alaska. Smaller pod size lets them travel far, often covering a 500 to 900 mile section of coastline.
For an in depth view at Transients’ pack hunting strategies see below.
Resident Orca pods stay together for a very long time, while transient pods often change members. And the two pods apparently don’t breed with one another, leading some biologists to think that the transients are a separate subspecies.
Very little is known about Off-shore Orcas since these whales rarely come in shore. In 2003 a group of 20 Outsider Orcas socialized with the local Resident pods. For a short period there were days with up to 100 whale sightings. The last time this happened was some 25 years earlier.
Transient Orcas feast on harvest of gray whale calves – Killer whales team up in Monterey Bay
San Francisco Chronicle, May 26, 2004
Monterey: The boatload of nature lovers set out to celebrate Mother’s Day whale watching on sunny Monterey Bay only to witness the mother of all wildlife battles.
Instead of gentle giants lolling in the sea, they came upon a life-or- death struggle as a pack of six killer whales attacked a gray whale calf while its mother valiantly fought to shield her 8-ton baby.
As whale watchers looked on with a mixture of awe and sadness, mother killer whales, the most experienced hunters, took turns ramming head first, like 6-ton torpedoes, into the calf’s soft underbelly, their force nearly knocking it out of the water, while others leapt atop the 20-foot baby, trying to drown it.
“It’s the greatest predation event on Earth,” said Richard Ternullo, a killer whale researcher and co-owner of Monterey Bay Whale Watch, who witnessed the battle during one of the company’s daily whale watching tours. “It’s 100 tons of whales crashing together.”
This brutal, natural drama has been repeated on an unprecedented scale in Monterey Bay this spring. Crafty killer whale packs have turned the bay into “ambush alley,” lying in wait for gray whale calves and their mothers to cross the bay’s deep-water canyon, the riskiest stretch of their 6,000- mile migration from Baja California, Mexico, to their Alaskan feeding grounds.
“In 17 years, I’ve never seen so many killer whales here,” said independent marine biologist Nancy Black, also a co-owner of Monterey Bay Whale Watch, who has used the whale watching tours to conduct and fund research into the still mysterious lives of killer whales that venture year round into Monterey Bay.
During the 2 1/2-hour Mother’s Day assault, the excited squeals of the killer whales, or orcas, drew others until 17 of the sleek black-and-white super-predators were milling about.
To the relief of the spectators, the clash had a happy ending: The 40-ton mother gray whale, rolling like a log to shed attackers and lifting the calf on her back above the attack, led her battered and bleeding baby to shallow coastal waters, where the orcas do not venture.
But other gray whales have not been as fortunate: About 15 calves were killed by killer whales in April and May in 22 documented attacks.
Black believes this year has been especially bloody because of a bumper crop of gray whale calves born over the winter and now heading north. Less ice coverage in the chilly Bering Sea last summer allowed gray whale mothers to beef up for their long trip south and produce a bounty of calves in Mexico. “I think the killer whales figured out that there were more calves coming through here and alerted other killer whales,” Black said.
Scientists don’t believe that orca attacks will hurt the greater gray whale population, estimated at 20,000. But they offer researchers eye-opening insights into the amazing teamwork and adaptiveness of these mighty predators, which some scientists consider “the modern T. rex of the oceans,” throwbacks to the fierce meat-eating dinosaurs.
“Most people don’t even realize you can see killer whales here,” Black said of Monterey Bay. “They think they’re only up north (from Washington state to Alaska).”
Ultimately, the titanic orca-gray whale clashes are a testament to the abundant marine life of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, where the upwelling of the cold, nutrient-rich water from the canyon attracts a staggering array of marine life. During a recent trip on Monterey Bay Whale Watch’s 70-foot Sea Wolf II, whale watchers from around the world thrilled to see everything from sea lions and hundreds of dolphins to humpback whales and 15 rare blue whales, at 100 feet long, the largest creature to ever roam the planet.
They’ve discovered dramatic differences among different types of orcas.
The so-called transient orcas are a group of about 300 killer whales that primarily roam the California coast, but extend all the way to Southeast Alaska. They are mammal eaters, killing baby gray whales in Monterey during the spring and shifting to sea lions, elephant seals and dolphins in the fall.
These fearsome predators have also been known to dine on great white sharks, turtles, seabirds and otters. Ternullo said that one researcher has documented orca kills of a dog, a pig and even the stray moose or deer caught swimming across inland waterways in the Northwest.
In contrast, there are the resident orcas, so called because they spend summer on the coast of Washington state and British Columbia, feeding almost exclusively on salmon. They also make occasional winter sojourns south to Monterey.
Finally, there are the mysterious off-shore orcas that roam the deep ocean and venture the farthest, 3,000 mile journeys from Southern California to Alaska. They prey on fish and squid. The widely ranging hunting habits of these killer whale groups have scientists pondering whether there are really two distinct subspecies — marine mammal-eaters and fish-eaters, Black said. “A new theory is that an ancient ice age isolated killer whale groups, forcing some to adapt to eating whales and seals and others to feed on fish.”
“The genetics are totally different for ‘transients’ (mammal-eaters) and ‘residents’ (fish-eaters). It’s like they’re from different oceans,” Black said.
Interestingly, the highly intelligent creatures bear many similarities to humans. Next to us, killer whales are the most widely dispersed mammals on the planet. They share similar life stages as humans from an adolescence that occurs in their teenage years and child-bearing in their 20s. Females can live until 90, males until 60.
As in African lion prides, the most experienced Orca hunters are often mothers. While male orcas can kill a gray whale calf in a couple of hours, the female-led attacks can last up to six hours. Researchers believe this is because the females are trying to teach their off-spring the family trade.
The gray whale attacks are savage but efficient, with each orca taking a specific role. Some females are separators, wedging themselves between the gray whale calf and its mother. Some ram the calf with a dull “bang,” while other Orcas jump atop to drown it. When they succeed, the attackers call in other killer whales for a blubbery feast that can last days.
To avoid detection, gray whales cease noisy, visible spouting and start to “snorkel” taking quiet, shallow breaths as they try to sneak across the narrow submarine canyon, Black said. If caught, the gray whale’s best chance is to flee for shoreline shallows, sometimes hiding behind rocks. There, orca teams are unable to surround and subdue the larger prey.
During the peak spring research season, when scientists spend 16-hour days on the water, Black said she and her colleagues have noticed that the killer whales “are checking us out, just like we’re checking them out.”
Gray Whales of the Pacific
Gray whales reach a length of about 16 meters (52 ft) a weight of 36 tonnes (35 LT; 40 ST) and lives 50–60 years. The common name of the whale comes from the gray patches and white mottling on its dark skin.
Gray whales are perhaps the most common whales seen in California.
The North Pacific species is unique in that almost the entire population follows a seasonal migration along the coastline of western North America from Mexico to the Arctic and back. Almost all of the gray whales spend the summer months (June, July, and August) in the Bering Sea area between Alaska and Russia. A few even venture north into the Arctic Ocean. In the fall the majority of the population migrates south, along the west coast of Canada and the United States, ending up in the quiet lagoons of Baja California during the winter months (January, February, and March). In the spring the population returns to the Bering Sea area. This 12,000 mile roundtrip may be the longest migration of any mammal on Earth.
The California Gray Whale is an endangered species success story. Twice having faced commercial extinction and the threat of biological extinction, its population has risen to pre-whaling levels. Hunted primarily for oil in the mid-nineteenth century, it was too rare to warrant commercial whaling by the 1870′s. Whaling resumed in the early twentieth century when the whale population increased. However, it was to be short lived; by 1935, the California Gray Whale had again reached commercial extinction. As of 1994, the population numbered 21,000 within the estimates of the pre-whaling population.
In May of 2010 a sighting of a gray whale was confirmed off the coast of Israel in the Mediterranean Sea, leading some scientists to think they might be repopulating old breeding grounds that have not been used for centuries. Another gray whale, believed to be the same spotted earlier off the coast of Israel, was spotted in June off Barcelona.
Dall’s Porpoise
Dall’s Porpoise (Phocoenoides dalli) is a species of porpoise found on the North Pacific. It came to worldwide attention in the 1970s when it was disclosed for the first time to the public that salmon fishing trawls were killing thousands of Dall’s Porpoise and other cetaceans each year by accidentally capturing them in their nets.
The Dall’s Porpoise is the only member of the Phocoenoides genus. It was named after American naturalist W.H. Dall.
Dall’s Porpoise (Phocoenoides dalli) is a species of porpoise found on the North Pacific.
Dall’s Porpoise appear in small groups (about 2– 10 in number). The groups appear not to be tight knit and may aggregate together at good feeding grounds. On very rare occasions a thousand or more individuals may be seen at the same time. They feed on a variety of fish and cephalopods. Shoals of fish such as herring, anchovies and mackerel are common meals.
Dall’s Porpoises are certainly not dull, they are hugely active creatures. They will often zigzag around at great speed on or just below the surface of the water creating a spray called a “rooster tail”. They may appear and disappear quite suddenly. The fastest of all small cetaceans, Dall’s Porpoises can swim at up to 55 km/h, almost as fast as the Orca. The porpoises will approach boats and will bow- and stern-ride, but may lose interest, unless the boat is travelling quickly.
Minke Whales
The minke (pronounced mink-ey) is a fast swimmer, capable of reaching speeds of 18-24 knots (16-21 mph). The minke can be curious, and has been known to approach ships, even at times keeping up with moving vessels. Often, however, minkes spend relatively little time at the surface. It may be hard to see a minke at sea because its blow is rarely visible and it tends to disappear quickly after exhaling. The whale breathes 3-5 times at short intervals before ‘deep-diving’ for 2–20 minutes. Since it is relatively small, it may be hidden in a choppy sea. Minke distribution is widespread, ranging from sub-tropical to polar waters. In their feeding grounds in the Antarctic, minkes will actually inhabit the pack ice!.
Minke whales are the smallest member of the rorqual family of whales (those whales with baleen, a dorsal fin, and throat pleats). One of its most distinctive features is the narrow, triangular rostrum (upper jaw). Minkes are baleen whales, having 280 to 300 yellowish-white baleen plates, usually no more than 11 inches in length, on each side of its upper jaw. Its body is slender and streamlined. Like all rorquals, the minke has a series of 50 to 70 ventral grooves, or pleats, that expand during feeding.
Adult males average about 8 m (26 feet) with a maximum length of 9.4 m (31 feet), while adult females average 8.2 m (27 feet) with a maximum length of 10.2 m (33 feet). Both males and females weigh about 10 tons. Both sexes are slightly larger in the southern hemisphere.
Minkes are found in all oceans, though they are rarely observed in the tropics. They seem to prefer icy waters, and are found right up to the edge of the icepack in polar regions, and have actually become entrapped in the ice fields on occasion.
Humpback Whales
The humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) is a baleen whale adults range in length from 12–16 metres (39–52 ft) and weigh approximately 36,000 kilograms (79,000 lb). The humpback has a distinctive body shape, with unusually long pectoral fins and a knobbly head. It is an acrobatic animal, often breaching and slapping the water. Males produce a complex whale song, which lasts for 10 to 20 minutes and is repeated for hours at a time. The purpose of the song is not yet clear, although it appears to have a role in mating.
Found in oceans and seas around the world, humpback whales typically migrate up to 25,000 kilometres each year. Humpbacks feed only in summer, in polar waters, and migrate to tropical or sub-tropical waters to breed and give birth in the winter. During the winter, humpbacks fast and live off their fat reserves. The species’ diet consists mostly of krill and small fish. Humpbacks have a diverse repertoire of feeding methods, including the bubble net feeding technique.
Like other large whales, the humpback was and is a target for the whaling industry. Due to over-hunting, its population fell by an estimated 90% before a whaling moratorium was introduced in 1966. Stocks have since partially recovered; however, entanglement in fishing gear, collisions with ships, and noise pollution also remain concerns. There are at least 80,000 humpback whales worldwide. Once hunted to the brink of extinction, humpbacks are now sought by whale-watchers, particularly off parts of Australia, Canada, and the United States.
