No orcas present. Today was all about the Humpbacks in Blackney Pass. It started at 3:19am when we heard a wonderful song in Blackfish Sound. This continued for a little under an hour becoming progressively fainter and more sporadic by 4:10am. At 4:30am one individual humpback passed close to the lab traveling north. Although dark it could easily be made out against the backdrop of moonlit fog. At 11am we heard brief interlude but nothing substantial and all remained quiet, on the hydrophones at least! If you have been enjoying the Sea lion camera as much as us you will know that it is anything but quiet above the water here. At 3pm we began to notice a lot of bird activity and then to our delight saw that there were three humpbacks also enjoying the bait balls. We followed them as best we could on the Orcalab Base camera and Anika was able to identify two of them as BCXuk2013#4 (a.k.a Ojos Blancos/White Eyes) and BCXuk2017#9. At 5:09pm another great song began and continued, again, for just under an hour though this was interspersed with a fair amount of boat noise. However, if you tune in now a beautiful song has just started in Blackfish Sound. It is loud and clear and so far no boat noise. Anika and Shari 25 Sep 2018 20:59:07 PDT No orcas present. Today was one of those days you will remember for the rest of your life. It was truly breathtaking! Last night ended with some nice Humpback sounds from Blackfish Sound. The morning started very rainy and foggy. At 10:17am Jared Towers reported that Bigg's (T100's and T002B's) were coming our way from Plumpers. Half an hour later they came silently into our view from Blackfish Sound heading south. We could see one big male, 5 small fins and a calf. They took a long dive and then suddenly started to become vocal at 11:20am. Right when they where straight in front of the Lab they started to turn around, and suddenly the big male, T100C, and the calf started breaching five times in a row! But it didn't end here. There was a lot of water splashing, and we realized that the group was hunting Sea Lions. We believe they took there time to teach the calf how to hunt and perhaps they were so incredibly vocal for the same reason. They breached quiet often in front of us and the vocalizations did not stop as they slowly made their way south. At 12:08pm the group was out of sight, but we followed them on our cameras into the Johnstone Strait, where they continued to hunt. At 2:40pm the Bigg's made their way further east in the Strait, and stopped calling. After 3:16pm we could still see some faint blows on our cameras, but lost them after a while in the glare. Laura, Anika, Momoko & Shari 25 Sep 2018 00:49:11 PDT