Between 1962 and 1973, at least 47 killer whales were captured in the waters between Vancouver Island and the mainland, most of them sold to aquariums. The same channel now carries a different kind of traffic.
Vessels running Vancouver Whale Watching Granville Island tours leave a working industrial island in the middle of a city and reach open water while the downtown towers are still in plain view.
Granville Island is not a natural island. It was pumped into existence in 1916, when the Vancouver Harbour Commissioners dredged False Creek and dropped the fill onto a tidal sandbar, creating roughly 35 acres of leased industrial land. Ironworks, cooperages, chain forges and cement silos followed. Duranleau Street, which fronts the water along the island's south side, honours Alfred Duranleau, Canada's Minister of Marine in the early 1930s. By the 1970s the sheds were failing. A federal redevelopment reopened the island in 1979 around a public market, and the working docks along the southern seawall, where Granville Island whale watching cruises still tie up, were never sanitised out of existence.
Beyond the First Narrows lies the Strait of Georgia, the deep central basin of the Salish Sea. Commercial whaling emptied it. The Coal Harbour station on northern Vancouver Island rendered whales until 1967, and humpbacks all but disappeared from these inside waters. They have returned steadily since the 1990s. Bigg's killer whales — mammal-hunting transients, genetically and acoustically distinct from the fish-eating southern residents — are now the orca most often recorded off Point Grey and among the Gulf Islands. Steller sea lions haul out on exposed rock. Harbour seals crowd the log booms and channel markers.
The catamaran and Zodiac fleets working out of False Creek carry hydrophones and onboard naturalists, and their sighting logs feed regional research databases. A Vancouver marine wildlife tour is, in that sense, also a survey line. Semi-covered catamarans hold the weather off and keep a heated cabin; rigid-hulled inflatables put passengers barely a metre above the swell. Vancouver Whale Watching Granville Island tickets are, in the end, an instrument of record as much as recreation: wilderness entered from a market square, orcas logged within sight of a skyline.
5 hr
