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Saturday, August 23, 2008

A Three Star Day


Nico, a fellow orca lover, used to always rate whale passbys on a scale of 1-3 stars. He was stingy giving out three stars, saving them for the very best of days, but I'm confident today would have been a three star day. I saw J and L Pods from the Western Prince this morning, where we had a beautiful look at Mega (L41) and his sisters Calypso (L94) and Matia (L77), who did two big breaches and a cartwheel. Js and Ls were heading south to meet up with the incoming K-Pod, and I was able to get back, pack a lunch, and head out to Lime Kiln to see them.

First, all three pods passed north close to shore, then, an hour later, they turned back and came south again. I took a whopping 442 photos - 10 of which I would classify as "three star" photos. There are tons of good photos, as it was hard to take a bad shot with whales that close, but I'm pretty ecstatic with 10 fabulous shots in one day! I'm sure most of them will make their way onto this blog, hopefully most of them in the next couple of days, but I only have time to post one right now. I'm still trying to figure out who all the whales are in the above photo - the one in the back is Spieden (J8), and at the age of 75 it's surprising to see her swimming with a few year old calf!

2 comments:

Jeanne said...

Monika...is that K-14 and new calf K42? look at the nick at the top of the trailing edge....interesting if it is - Spieden being the Auntie whale that she is...helping out maybe????

Monika said...

Jeanne, I think you're probably right! It was so cool to see the whales all mixed up and mingling with one another, even if it makes it that much harder to ID them in the photos!