Encounter Summary: 

In the late afternoon of 5 January 2016, Mark Malleson received a call from a friend who was roofing a house near the waterfront by the Golf Course at Gonzales Point, Victoria, British Columbia. He reported many killer whales in a group heading rapidly in an easterly direction, and this was almost immediately verified by Malleson’s wife, Hannah, who observed upwards of thirty whales with many large-fin males travelling through Baynes Channel a few minutes later around 1530 hours. The roofer reported that some whales may also have headed toward Seabird Point on Discovery Island in an easterly direction. Around 1620, a few distant calls were audible on the Lime Kiln hydrophones at San Juan Island, and by 1815 there were loud calls on the Orcasound hydrophones a few miles north near Mitchell Point, San Juan Island. The whales were northbound and quite chatty, but it was pitch dark so there was no visual verification of whales presumed to be J’s and K’s from their calls.
At daybreak on 6 January, Tom and Jane Cogan departed Snug Harbor San Juan Island in their motorboat “Morningstar” and proceeded up Haro Strait through Swanson Channel and Active Pass and into Georgia Strait on a search. By then it was estimated that the whales were near Nanaimo if they continued northwesterly up the strait in a typical winter pattern, but it was a long-shot to find them in the vastness of Georgia Strait. Just about when they were ready to give up their search at 1051, Tom spotted several dorsal fins in the distance near the Winchelsea Islands northwest of Nanaimo. They immediately called Ken Balcomb, who relayed their finding to Paul Cottrell and John Ford of DFO, Canada. Tom and Jane were able to find several K and L matrilines very spread out and swimming at 8 knots toward the northwest, and they obtained distant proof of presence photographs before focusing attention on a young male, K33, who was wearing a new satellite tag on the right side of his dorsal fin. It is important to note that they and we had no information on the whereabouts of K33 from the tag transmissions. The whales were found and inventoried using the traditional patient and persistent method of searching the most likely habitat, following surmise from an acoustic detection, looking for any clue of surface disturbance or pattern (blow, splash, fins, etc.), and taking photographs of animals found. By the afternoon of 7 January, the satellite data as reported by the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, indicated that K33 was near Campbell River at the upper reach of Georgia Strait. Whales were also reported off Powell River on the Canada Sunshine Coast northwest of Vancouver on 7 January, so the whales may be very spread out. We do not yet have verification of J pod presence in Georgia Strait, but it is likely, and it will be evidenced by photo-identification if they show up within range or with the K and L matrilines exiting the Georgia Strait in the reverse pattern of their arrival. All of these efforts, and efforts yet to be made in coastal waters of the eastern North Pacific Ocean are to best determine critical habitat usage for this Endangered population of Pacific Northwest killer whales.