Myself, Jacqui and a Danish friend of ours, Rikke, headed over to Victoria, on Vanouver Island, last weekend to go whale watching. We boarded the ferry from Tsawassen straight from work on Friday evening, arriving in the backpackers in Victoria around 8pm, just in time to get some food and book our place on the whale-watching boat for 9am the next day.

On waking on Saturday morning we were greeted by drizzling rain, which wasn’t what I wanted to see when facing three hours in an open boat. When we arrived at the shop there were loads of great photos of orcas so I was glad I’d brought out my good camera. We got dressed up in all-weather survival suits and boarded our semi-rigid inflatable, ready to cast off. It wasn’t raining too hard, but I still made sure to keep my camera inside the suit.

Once clear of the mouth of the harbour, the twin outboard engines throttled up and we were off. The sea around Victoria is sheltered from the open ocean by Washington State, so it was a nice, calm ride out to the San Juan Islands where we met J-Pod, one of the families which frequent the area.

As you would expect, there are rules that commercial whale-watching operators must obey to minimise the impact on the whales, the main one of which is that the boats are not allowed to approach within 200m. Even with my 200mm zoom lens on the whales were still pretty small, so I wondered who’d taken all the photos in the shop, as they were much closer than 200m. Apparently, if the whales choose to come closer to the boat, that’s OK, but since J-Pod were sleeping when we encountered them, they completely ignored us.

If I get around to doing another trip I’ll make sure to go on an afternoon boat in the hope that they’ll be a little more curious, though with the number of boats visiting them daily I’d say they’re unlikely to be bothered investigating all that often. After 90 minutes with the whales it was time for us to head back to harbour and get some dry clothes on and avoid the crap weather by heading to the movies. Before doing that though, we went to the Bug Zoo which was pretty interesting. I got to hold a Giant African Millipede, which was about 15cm long!

Sunday dawned and it was still raining, throwing our plans into disarray, as all the stuff we wanted had planned to do was outdoors. After a drive around Victoria we decided to head back to Vancouver early, stopping off at the Butterfly Gardens on the way, as it was indoors. We figured we’d be there for 20 minutes or so, but it ended up being closer to tow hours. It was really interesting, as they’d loads of different species of butterflies fluttering about, along with some flamingoes and other smaller birds. Myself and Jacqui took loads of photos, and some of mine came out really well, though I was playing around with my manual settings, so the depth of field was really shallow on a lot of photos. If I’d increased it just a fraction more I would have had some awesome shots. Still, I was pretty happy with a few of them.

Whale Photos

Butterfly Photos