A woman from Canada lost her life when a grey whale breaking into the ocean surface hit a tourist sea vessel, authorities in Mexico said on Wednesday.

The 35-year-old tourist was tossed into the water when the whale collided with the boat more than a kilometer away from the beach haven of Cabo San Lucas. Investigators did not identify the victim or her hometown.

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The victim was in the boat with other tourists on their way back to port at about noon when the whale surfaced and landed on the vessel, according to the commander of the community firefighters, Juan Carvajal Figueroa.

Mexico's navy responders rushed to the scene and took the victim to shore. She was treated in a clinic but she died from injuries.

The death was announced on the same day that authorities in Mexico noted an unusually high number of grey whales crowded the accident site at this time of the year, a season for whale watching which lasts from the middle of December to the last part of April.

A recent census showed a tenfold rise in the number of the whales compared to last season, one of the fastest growth in migrations in the past two decades, according to Mexico's the National Commission for Natural Protected Areas.

Last week, up north, a humpback whale that is as huge as a minivan was beached near Watsonville around the shores of Washington state.

Witnesses said the whale floated ashore on Thursday last week and was found beached at about 7:30 in the morning the next day.

A biologist with Cascadia Research in Olympia, Washington - John Calambokidis - did confirm the beached whale was a younger humpback.

Though packs of humpback whales are most commonly seen off the California coast from the migration months of April to November, Calambokidis said there is a smaller pod that would pass by the area a couple of weeks earlier. Most adult humpbacks are seen in the winter-feeding waters off Central America but young humpbacks are known to frequent Monterey Bay.