VIDEO: Happy hump day: Victoria angler reels in whale of a surprise<\/p>\n
Published 5:00 pm Thursday, July 23, 2026<\/p>\n
When Vic West resident David Jenvey cast a line from the end of the Breakwater, he was hoping to reel in a fish or two.<\/p>\n
Instead, he caught something far more memorable \u2013 a front-row seat to the sight of a humpback whale surfacing in Victoria\u2019s Outer Harbour.<\/p>\n
The fleeting encounter unfolded Tuesday morning (July 21), with only Jenvey there to witness the giant marine mammal gliding through the calm waters, seemingly departing the harbour.<\/p>\n
First alerted by the unmistakable whoosh of a whale exhaling, Jenvey grabbed his phone and scanned the water, trying to anticipate where it would surface next.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe water was flat and calm, and then I heard it again, I saw it come up \u2013 he was almost directly in front of me,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
As quickly as it appeared, the whale slipped beneath the surface and vanished.<\/p>\n
About 30 minutes later, the familiar blow echoed across the harbour once more, a humpback surfacing between the Breakwater and the Ogden Point terminal.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was circling around in the harbour part by the pilot boats,\u201d said Jenvey. \u201cWhether that was the same one that had come back or whether it was another one, I\u2019m not sure.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Naturalist and Prince of Whales captain Mark Malleson said he couldn\u2019t identify the whale in Jenvey\u2019s video, but noted humpbacks are plentiful in the Salish Sea at this time of year.<\/p>\n
While encountering one close to Victoria\u2019s waterfront does happen on occasion, sightings offshore around Greater Victoria are not unusual. The same day Jenvey saw the Breakwater whale, folks at Clover Point spotted humpbacks out at sea.<\/p>\n
Their abundance is a far cry from the animal\u2019s recent history.<\/p>\n
Once targeted by commercial whalers, humpback whales disappeared from the Salish Sea by the early 1900s. Even after commercial whaling ended in 1966, sightings remained rare and sporadic for decades.<\/p>\n
That began to change in 1997, when Malleson photographed a humpback known as \u2018Big Mama\u2019 near Victoria.<\/p>\n
The encounter marked the beginning of his long-running effort to catalogue humpbacks.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have now photo-catalogued over 1,000 humpbacks in the Salish Sea and documented four generations of animals here,\u201d he said. \u201cBig Mama has brought eight known calves here herself and is one of a few great grandmothers.\u201d<\/p>\n
While the identity of his morning companion will likely remain a mystery, Jenvey says the encounter is one he won\u2019t forget.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven though it just lasted a few seconds a couple of times, to be standing at the Breakwater and see that is a neat nature moment,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Now he\u2019s hoping lightning might strike twice, with another ocean giant.<\/p>\n
Despite frequently spotting a menagerie of wildlife while out on his daily evening walks, Jenvey has yet to see a pod of killer whales venture into Victoria\u2019s harbour, something that has happened several times over the last couple of years.<\/p>\n
\u201cI see otters and seals all the time, but I\u2019ve never seen a killer whale in the harbour,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Hopefully his luck will prove better than his interrupted morning fishing expedition \u2013 Jenvey went home empty-handed.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe scared all the fish away, I didn\u2019t catch anything,\u201d he says with a laugh. \u201cBut I\u2019d rather watch a whale in the wild than maybe catch something.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"VIDEO: Happy hump day: Victoria angler reels in whale of a surprise Published 5:00 pm Thursday, July 23,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":822530,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,66,323],"class_list":["post-822529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=822529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822529\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/822530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=822529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=822529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=822529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}