We went on a whale watching tour which was one of the best things that I’ve ever done. We got out to see a group of about 10-12 humpback whales and they were feeding at the time on small fish (herring, if I remember rightly) – it’s called Bubble feeding and the tour guide told us that only a very small amount of people in the world ever get to see this phenomenon. A quick rundown of it:
What you see are a stack of seagulls circling around and then when you see the seagulls zoom down to the water that means that the whales are about to explode out of the water. You see, as underneath the water, the whales are creating bubbles (thousands of bubbles) and they create the bubbles in a circle – and the bubbles trap the fish. The whales then move up toward the surface and the fish swim to the surface (seemingly trapped by the bubbles) – and that’s what has the interest of the seagulls because moments before the whales appear, you fleetingly see the fish jumping up out of the water and some of the seagulls are lucky enough to score a fish.
It is THEN that the whales appear in a rush out of the water travelling straight up with their mouths open and hundreds of litres (gallons) of water enter their mouths and they come out of the water – how far out of the water is hard to say, but it would have to have been around several metres; they then turn and glide along the top of the water and jet out massive sprays of water out of their blowholes and the sound is something else and they do this for about a minute and just before they dive again to try for another bout of feeding, this is when they kind of arch their back (hence their name of humpback) and you see their enormous tail arch up into the air and then slide back into the water. They are a huge huge mammal and it’s something that I’ll remember forever. On that particular evening, we also saw two Orcas – amazing because our guide told us that it’s not an often thing to see them. Then as we were heading back, we went past a giant water bouy and just lazing in on it, we saw 6 sea lions, just sunning themselves. At that particular time it was 7:30pm.
Sunset over there was on average sometime after 9pm, and sunrises (never saw any of them) were around 4:30am.
We also saw salmon spawning up some tiny creeks, masses of salmon jumping in the waters of the inside passage, heaps of sea otters, seals.
