Local environmentalist John Buchanan said he got the thrill and scare of his life this weekend when he found himself eyeball to eyeball with a grey whale.
"Very exciting, I couldn't sleep for two days," he said.
On Friday (May 1), Buchanan paddled his canoe near the Squamish Estuary to the mouth of the Squamish River when he encountered the hulking creature, which can reach a length of about 16 metres and weight of 36 tonnes.
"I'm just drifting in the canoe where it's feeding. It knows I'm there. Swam right underneath the canoe, came up beside me and had a B-line with my eye and had a look at me and carried on with its feeding," he said.
"It's a bit frightening, I got to tell you. When he comes up, he's four feet away from you. You don't know where he's going to come up. You have no idea."
Buchanan returned Saturday and Sunday (May 2 and 3) and took video, which he posted to Youtube. He also sent close-up shots to the University of Victoria whale lab along with reports of his observations.
"When he was off to the mouth of the Squamish River where the water was a bit deeper, he would act differently out there," said Buchanan.
"But when he went in the central basin, I started to get a bit worried there because he was in like four feet of water, on his side, stirring up the bottom feeding on the organisms on the bottom."
Calls to the university's whale lab were not immediately returned.
The whale was again spotted Monday, thrilling those who had gathered at Nexen Beach some from Vancouver in hopes of spotting it.
Buchanan said despite the thrill, he'll be happy to see the whale resume its three-month migration, which the mammals make each year starting in October between their feeding grounds in the Bering Sea and mating areas in southern California and Mexico.
"I don't really want him to hang around here too long. He should be going up to Alaska where he belongs," said Buchanan.
There have been a number of reports of grey whales washing ashore along the coast over the last month. On Easter weekend, a whale died on the shore of East Sooke Park. Another landed in Oakland Bay in the southern reaches of Puget Sound. Shortly afterward, a grey whale beached at Samish Bay near Anacortes. The next day, another dead whale turned up north of Whidbey Island in Deception Pass. And a few days after that, a grey whale died near west Seattle.
Over the last 100 years, there have been no reports of grey whales getting that close to the estuary, and Buchanan wondered if the past few years' attempts of reestablishing local herring populations attracted the crustacean-eating mammal.
"We had a huge [herring] hatch out about a week ago," said Buchanan.
Herring has long used pilings to spawn their eggs. During the 1960s herring was plentiful in the channel, according to reports, but something occurred in the 1970s that caused the population of the fish to decline.
In 2006, Squamish Streamkeeper co-ordinator John Matsen discovered the creosote meant to protect pilings was poisoning herring eggs and killing them.
Since then, the Streamkeepers have been wrapping the pilings with material non-toxic to herring eggs. Since then, the population has boomed, and along with it, the sea life it sustains.
Squamish River Watershed Society co-ordinator Edith Tobe has also spearheaded efforts with the Streamkeepers and Squamish Nation to improve habitat for herring along Howe Sound shores through eelgrass restoration, which herring also use to spawn their eggs.
"It's so hard to say why it came up here," she said. "But it only makes sense that the herring are coming back in larger numbers, and if a whale started following it down at Georgia Strait and just kept kind of kept going up Howe Sound, that could be what happened."
Tobe expressed excitement over the "once in a lifetime" event, adding she hopes someone's looking into the health of the whale.
Buchanan also had another theory about the whale's presence.
"Well, the whale seems to know his way around," he said. "The Squamish Nation had a pole raising ceremony last year this could be one of the old, wise Squamish chiefs coming up for a visit."
