With business on hold for the foreseeable future, Two Eagles Lodge co-owner Carolyn Touhey has been home-schooling her two grandsons.
On Friday (May 8) they took a field trip on the family boat, touring Hornby Island.
The trip home gave Rylann (6) and Robbie (8) plenty of fodder for a follow-up writing assignment.
A pod of five whales put on a show for well over an hour; surfacing, splashing, and breaching.
“It was amazing,” said Carolyn. “I haven’t even gone through all the videos I shot,” she said, adding that while it looks like they were close, she was shooting with a 60x zoom lens.
“We were parked, having dinner on our way back from Hornby, and Steve (Carolyn’s husband) was on the back deck doing something, and he said ‘I just saw a whale, and it was really close!’ So with that we put down our dinner and I grabbed the camera.”
There was an abundance of orca activity throughout the area all weekend, with reports of as many as 25 being spotted.
Carolyn said there were five in the pod her family spotted.
“The one was so tiny – it had to be a baby,” she said. “They were surfacing quite frequently. I don’t know if they were on a feeding frenzy, or just playing, or what – I don’t know whale behaviour. But it was just great. We’ve been lucky on our boat before, seeing humpbacks, seeing orcas, but usually with the orcas they just pass by – they are not usually as entertaining as humpbacks. But these were amazing.”
ALSO: More protection for southern resident orcas
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