Soon after leaving the dock in Alder Bay this morning a Minke Whale was sighted foraging close along the Vancouver Island shoreline. Passengers enjoyed several good sightings of the whale and also observed small fish schooling together in a bait ball on the surface of the water that the whale seemed unaware of and with no diving birds in sight to feed on them, in time they dove and disappeared from sight. The gorgeous weather continued today with sunshine, clear blue skies and blue water reflecting back at us with a beautiful backdrop of the BC Coast Range Mountains when we headed out into the Queen Charlotte Strait on the ebb current making our way towards the two resident orcas that we had sighted yesterday, the brothers A37 and A46 from the A36 Matriline. They were making their way steadily on the ebb current over to Lizard Point and beyond, separate at times and then close together they were observed foraging. At the time that we had our hydrophone deployed they did not vocalize, they were very relaxed and as we watched, they turned and commenced travelling back to the east with the current that had turned to flood. Other sightings included: bow-riding dall’s porpoises, black-tailed deer on the shore, rhinoceros auklets, common murres, harbour seals, california, mew and glaucous -winged gulls. A large group of Bigg’s (Transient) orcas were reported later in the day in Johnstone Strait, 18 in total, all of whom at 3:30 p.m. this afternoon could be seen making their way past Alert Bay in two groups of 6 and 12 orcas. They were identified by Jared as the T100's, T101's, T90's, T 86A's & T36A's.