A sunrise paddle turned into a surprise orca sighting for one South Surrey resident Wednesday morning.
After enjoying a peaceful paddle on calm ocean waters off Crescent Beach's Blackie Spit, Heather Higginson was loading her paddleboard up to go home in the parking lot, when she thought she noticed something in the wake of a boat that had just gone by.
Thinking she might be mistaken, she asked another woman nearby if she saw it, too.
"She said, 'Yes, I saw two dorsal fins,'" Higginson said. "I couldn't believe it was happening. This was in the channel – so close to shore! – in the Blackie Spit parking lot."
She was in her vehicle on the phone to her husband, telling him about the glimpse.
"Then I saw the dorsal fins came up again and I said, 'Oh my God, I gotta go! They're back!"
That when she took the photos and video, which she later posted to a local social media group.
"There were four (whales)... I guess they were just cruising for the coho (salmon)," Higginson said. "Someone commented on Facebook that they were the Bigg's variety of orca, not the resident southern orcas, but still... they were so close to shore!'
She couldn't believe that she missed the orcas by mere minutes.
"I had been on the water 20 minutes before they passed – that just keeps going through my head – like, my God, if I had just hung out longer in the water, I would have literally been in their path as they went by," she said. "That would have just been tremendously exciting and terrifying at the same time! Just stunning."
No one she talked to remembers seeing orcas in the area, she added.
"My husband – he grew up in White Rock, on the top of the hill – he said he hasn't seen anything like that in 54 years," she said. "It was pretty tremendous. I was literally buzzing all day."
