There are easier whales to see. The humpback, for example, puts on acrobatic displays annually in Maui. Along their 6,000-mile migration between Mexico and Alaska, gray whales can be spotted from shore. Curious sperm whales in the Caribbean have been known to approach whale-watching boats. Orcas, it turns out, are much less predictable quarry.
Orcas move mysteriously. Even so-called “resident” pods are elusive. But SeaWorld was not what he meant when my son — no new bike or video game for this millennial — asked to see an orca for his 16th birthday.
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Two years after the 2013 documentary “Blackfish” that investigated orcas in captivity, including the 2010 death of SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau during a performance, SeaWorld vowed to end its theatrical “Shamu” killer whale shows. In March it announced it would no longer breed orcas in captivity, allowing the current populations to live out their lives peacefully in its pools in San Antonio, San Diego and Orlando, Fla.
But if conscience prohibits viewing them in captivity, what does it take to see orcas in the wild? Seth and I decided to find out.
According to researchers, one of the best places to see orcas is British Columbia, specifically the Johnstone Strait, a 68-mile channel between the Canadian mainland and northern Vancouver Island. Most orcas are transient and feed opportunistically. But in British Columbia, resident pods return each summer, late July through September, roughly coinciding with the rich salmon runs in the rainforested region. Scientists believe the area draws over 200 orcas, more than twice as many as the southern residents in Washington’s San Juan Islands.
Despite its remote locale on northeastern Vancouver Island, the tiny former fishing village of Telegraph Cove is orca central. Charter operators listen via radio to scientists monitoring the animals in the strait and send tourist-packed boats racing in the direction of sightings.
Seth and I arrived in Telegraph Cove to join a four-day camping trip with ROW Sea Kayak Adventures. The outfitter supplies all food and gear, in the service of adventurous but unequipped paddlers (from $1,220 per adult; www.seakayakadventures.com). We filled our cargo hold with groceries, and snapped our spray skirts around the cockpits of our tandem red Passat G3 kayak. With two guides and nine guests we made a six-boat fleet, setting out southward along the coast where red pine and hemlock picketed steep, rocky banks.
“This is orca highway, but we like to lower expectations right away,” said our otherwise optimistic guide Quy Le. “We see orcas 95 percent of the time, but there’s always the 5 percent we don’t.”
Wild, but not empty, the Johnstone Strait serves as a marine highway for sailboats, trawlers, ferries, cruise ships and, of course, whale-watching boats. On a still and sunny day, we stroked flat water while our attention drifted to bald eagles in the trees, purple sea stars gripping submerged rock walls and Dall’s porpoises swimming sine-wave patterns.
Blisters swelled by the time we reached camp, 5 miles down-channel, on one end of a broad scalloped cove where wave-smoothed rocks piled like dunes. While the guides set up a makeshift kitchen, we paddlers dashed to claim tents already erected in the woods, complete with lanterns and cots.
At “appie hour,” the first of a daily ritual of appetizers and boxed wine, Le demystified orcas. The largest members of the dolphin family, orcas, he said, were historically demonized as killer whales by fishermen who feared their competition. The erect dorsal fins of males can grow to over 6 feet. Curved dorsal fins mark the females. Both genders display unique white or gray saddle patches behind their fins, the cetaceous version of fingerprints.
Mid-lecture, we heard a distant cry: “Orcas!”
Twenty feet from our granite headland, a tall, black fin knifed through the water, preceded by several smaller, swept-back fins. They were heading down the channel at an even pace when the smallest among them, a baby, stopped and poked its head up, levitating out of the water to get a better look at us — something I’d only seen at SeaWorld — before swimming on. The magical mental video looped throughout the evening, making the baked salmon richer and the sunset spectrum, illuminating the pod as it passed again, blusher.
Successful on day one, we eagerly scanned for activity the next morning during a nearly three-hour paddle to Robson Bight Ecological Reserve, an orca sanctuary. Boats, including kayaks, are banned in the bight where the animals purportedly haul themselves onto the rocky shores known as rubbing beaches.
“It’s like going to a spa and getting a back massage,” said Mike Rutter, a Robson Bight warden, who arrived in a Zodiac boat at the closest beach to the preserve where we’d landed for lunch.
If the orcas were at the spa, we had no way of knowing. As the sky clouded, we paddled back, encountering our first rain, light at first, then steady and persistent for the next two days. Sodden but cheerful, the guides assured us this was good. Rain, they said, swells the streams, which elicits the salmon, which draw the orcas, making orca watching a sometimes-soggy proposition.
Carrying on, we spent one morning crossing the strait to reach a moss-slicked hiking trail that ended at a towering 1,100-year-old red pine. We ate Dutch-oven lasagna under sheltering trees and sang “Happy Birthday” around a damp, smoky fire. We never stopped scanning for orcas and saw humpbacks and sea lions and heard, in the hush of the mornings, Dall’s porpoises exhaling as they surfaced. We eventually struck camp, compared calluses and headed back to Telegraph Cove with survivor’s pride and soaking-wet laundry.
Rounding the final corner before port, still searching for whales, we encountered not an orca, but a brown bear. Emerging from the brush beside a waterfall, he sniffed his way along a rock ledge, plucked berries from salal bushes and scaled the nearly vertical hillside, bestowing a lasting birthday gift by teaching my son to never stop looking.
Elaine Glusac is a freelance writer.
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