In 1961, Canada's Department of Fisheries mounted a machine gun on a bluff above Seymour Narrows, intending to cull the killer whales of the Strait of Georgia. It was never fired.
Three years later a young orca harpooned off Saturna Island was towed alive into Vancouver Harbour, named Moby Doll, and studied for 87 days before dying. Public sentiment turned within a decade.
That reversal underwrites the modern trade in vancouver whale watching zodiac tours, an industry founded on observation rather than extraction. Commercial trips began in the Salish Sea during the mid-1980s, when a few skippers realised passengers would pay to watch what fisheries officers had once shot. Rigid-hulled inflatables reached the Steveston waterfront in Richmond in the 1990s, and open-air wildlife cruises from Vancouver have run out of that former salmon-canning village ever since. Naturalists aboard began logging dorsal-fin nicks, saddle patches and fluke markings. Those field notebooks hardened into photo-identification catalogues that today name individual Bigg's killer whales and returning humpbacks by number.
The water itself explains why Strait of Georgia whale watching works. The strait runs roughly 220 kilometres between the British Columbia mainland and Vancouver Island, reaching depths near 400 metres, and the Fraser River pours silt and nutrient into its southern basin. Tidal currents squeeze through Active Pass and the channels around Galiano and Gabriola, concentrating herring and salmon, and the seals that feed on them. Bigg's killer whales hunt those seals. Humpbacks, absent for decades after the Coal Harbour whaling station closed in 1967, returned to the strait in numbers through the 2010s and now lunge-feed within sight of the Gulf Islands ferry lanes. Steller sea lions haul out on rock ledges; bald eagles hold the snags above them.
Regulation has tightened around all of it. Since 2019, federal rules have required vessels to stay 400 metres from killer whales in southern British Columbia waters, and experienced skippers throttle down long before that line. Sightings recorded aboard small open boats feed the Ocean Wise cetacean database, which underpins habitat protection for the endangered Southern Resident population. Hydrophone recordings and fluke photographs travel back with every crew. Demand for vancouver whale watching zodiac tickets has, in that sense, become a funding mechanism for the science that constrains it — a quiet inversion of the gun above Seymour Narrows.
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