November 10: A memorable day on the water

Things have been changing so much and so quickly in the Salish Sea; the transformations are astounding. When I first started spending time up here 20 years ago, both humpback and transient killer whales were rare sights. Now, they are around almost daily - even in November! With a friend up visiting for a long weekend, we headed out on the water with Maya's Legacy today and our sightings rivaled a good day during the "peak season" (whatever that is anymore!)

Early in the morning a report came in of the T18s near Orcas Island, and luckily they didn't travel too far too fast. We caught up with them at the west end of Spieden Channel, where they were first split into pairs with T18 Esperanza and T19 Spouter together, and T19 Mooyah and T19B Galiano about a mile further to the west.

18 year-old male T19C Spouter

A little while after we got there, the two groups merged and started making their way northwest up Haro. 

From left to right T19B Galiano, T18 Esperanza, and T19C Spouter

They were zig-zagging a bit, but their final surfacing before we left was perfectly lined up with the Turn Point l=Lighthouse. What a sight!

The T18s in front of the Turn Point Lighthouse

As we reversed course back through Spieden Channel we slowed down along Spieden Island. With its exotic wildlife, it rarely disappoints, but it was exceptional today. There were hundreds of Mouflon sheep, sika deer, and fallow deer out; more sika deer than I had ever seen, in fact!

Sika deer buck

It's also rutting season, which means there's plenty of drama unfolding! This male was bleating at these two very unimpressed females.

Male fallow deer bleating

We were distracted from the exotic wildlife when we spotted a family of river otters running along the hillside! They darted down into the water but 7 of them tried to all climb out on this little rock at the same time, some of them sneaking a curious look at us as we looked at them. One of the collective nouns for a group of otters is a "romp", and watching them today, you could see why!

A romp of sea otters

Down at Green Point there weren't any Steller sea lions hauled out, but there was a gang of them in the water. This one looks vicious in the photo, but he was just yawning.

We only got a quick look at the sea lions, because just across San Juan Channel was a humpback whale! We were shaking our heads in bewilderment at so many sightings on a chilly November afternoon! It was BCY0160 known as Heather, who seemed to just be doing circles.

BCY0160 Heather

It was just a short ride back to Friday Harbor from there, but I kept my camera out anyway, and I was glad I did! Eight ancient murrelets were flying amazingly fast, keeping pace with us for about a minute!

Ancient murrelets in San Juan Channel

By the end of the day, by my count, we had seen eight mammal species and about another dozen marine bird species - not too shabby!

It's T Time!

As we get into March and April, we hopefully anticipate whale sightings to start increasing. In years past, this is the time the residents start to spend more time around the San Juans, and in more recent years with the residents elsewhere it has been a time of abundant transient sightings. So far, March is shaping up to be a transient kinda month!

On Thursday, March 5th, I heard a group of transients was out in the middle of Haro Strait. It was too tempting not to take a long lunch break to go investigate! We met up with the T18s near Kelp Reef. T18 Esperanza was nearby but off on her own, while T19 Mooyah was traveling with her two sons T19B Galiano and T19C Spouter. (This group is among the transients named by the Vancouver Aquarium.)

From left to right: T19B, T19C, and T19

They were swimming in circles, intermittently fanning out and then joining up again. That unpredictable surface behavior combined with long dive times led to this unexpected close surfacing by T19B. I've seen this whale a decent amount over the years, and he's definitely grown up, because our little boat felt downright tiny as he approached!

T19B Galiano

T19C, meanwhile, was sporting some pretty serious battle scars on one side of his dorsal fin:

Because I had to get back to work, we just had a short jaunt out on the 5th, though I heard later on that these whales met up with the T60s and T2B.

On Saturday, March 7th, the weather was just to beautiful to not get on the water again. I wanted to wait until the afternoon, hopeful that whales would show up....and they did! Around mid-day I heard about another group of transients on the west side of San Juan Island. Several of us met up and took out Serenity, and we came across the first whales just slightly south of our home port. The first whales we saw were T137A and T137B; we knew their other two family members had to be around somewhere. When these two whales went IN to Open Bay and gulls started circling overhead, we assumed they had made a kill, and this seemingly attracted mom T137 and the youngest, three year-old T137C.

T137 (age 32) and T137C (age 3)

T137A (age 13) and T137B (age 9)

Eventually the whales came out of the bay and rounded Henry Island. Near Battleship Island we saw harbor porpoise speeding right towards us....away from the whales. Sure enough, they made another kill here, of a harbor porpoise. All the whales were circling and converging, undoubtedly prey sharing.

T137, T137A, and T137 B converge and feed together

What happened next was something I've never seen before. One of the whales (I later determined it was T137A) spyhopped, shaking its head back and forth (in head-banging fashion) with a piece of meat in its mouth. I was excited when I saw it, but even more so when I looked at the pictures later: the piece of meat was actually a fully intact harbor porpoise fetus!!

T137A with harbor porpoise fetus

Just imagine the dexterity required to remove that from the mother intact....I know many people are sad to see a photo like this, but it just left me in awe to witness it live!

After finishing their meal and the four whales grouped up and started heading towards Stuart Island. About now most of the other boats on scene took off, leaving us with the whales! It's the first time I've had to try and track transients on my own. When they zig-zag all over the place and take long dives (these guys were going down for 6 minutes at a time) you never know where they might pop up next. Luckily, the waters were like glass so we could see them from far away regardless of where they popped up.

The T137s

On one surfacing they suddenly made a left turn and started heading across Haro. This group of whales has recently spent a lot of time in Puget Sound and got the reputation for being boat curious. For whatever reason, in the whole wide straight, they chose to pass by right off our stern. (They didn't really seem especially curious about us, though - they just seemed to not care we were there.)

13 year-old male T137A. Focal length on the zoom lens was just 86mm for this shot!

Once they passed us, their blows looked awesome:

We followed them over towards Gooch in Canadian waters. The blows just got more impressive as the sun lowered in the sky.

T137A off Forrest Island in BC

T137A split off from the other three for a while. We thought (or hoped) they might be trying to stir up something else to eat, but they seemed content to just slowly continue on their way.

T137 and T137B

We got one last, nice look of T137A with Mt. Baker in the background:

Mt. Baker, the very distant Turn Point Light Station, and T137A

On the way home we got an unexpected grand finale when a few Dall's porpoise came over and rode the bow (and stern wake) on Serenity. It was the first time we've had playful porpoise on our boat, and it turns out our low-to-the-water ride is in the perfect splash zone for rooster-tailing Dall's! They drenched the windshield and some of my passengers before we went out separate ways.

In the end, we spent an amazing four hours with the T137s; that's among the longest length of time I've been able to follow one family group of whales (resident or transient) and see what they do. It's super interesting to watch them over a period of hours rather than just getting a snapshot of their day when they pass by land or on a commercial whale-watching trip. Because I'm such a nerd, I made this little map to show where we followed them:

So far March is off to an AMAZING start!!

"We've made contact! We've made contact!"

Reports this morning were of all three resident pods heading out west towards the open ocean, so it looked like we might not see orcas on our Western Explorer trip early this afternoon. We headed out with sunny skies and flat-calm water, ready to join the search for any transient whales that might be in the are and off to look at all the other wildlife the San Juan Islands have to offer.

Just a few hundred yards from our slip we spotted a juvenile harbor seal who was foraging on some bait fish. Whenever the seal dove, all the bait fish would start jumping into the air! As we cruised north harbor porpoise could be seen in small groups of two or three animals everywhere. We stopped to watch a bald eagle swoop down towards the water (it failed to catch a fish), and also looked at red-necked phalaropes, rhinoceros auklets, common murres, pigeon guillemots, and several species of gulls.

Patos Lighthouse, with cool cloud formations behind

Captain Ivan knew that no one had searched near Sucia and Patos Islands yet, and also knew that the transient orcas in the area yesterday have been seen in that area before, so that's the direction we headed next, following his hunch that if the whales were still in the area, that's where they might be. As we passed Patos Lighthouse we saw some rooster tails up ahead of us - a telltale sign of Dall's porpoise! We haven't seen as many Dall's this year so we were excited to go check them out, when all of a sudden three MUCH bigger dorsal fins surfaced behind the porpoise - killer whales!! There was a stunned second of silence before the whoops of excitement began. Then Ivan got to get on the marine radio to tell the other whale watch boats "We've made contact, we've made contact!" meaning that we've found whales - an honorable moment in a whale watch captain's day as he gets to be the hero of the hour.

It's always so exciting to be the boat that first spots the whales. The orcas travel up to 100 miles a day and one never knows where they will show up first thing in the morning, but the residents have some pretty typical traveling patterns. Transients are much harder to find, so luck and Ivan's intuition were definitely on our side today!

There were four whales in the group we found today - females T18 and T19, 14 year-old male T19B, and youngster T19C. T19B has a "sprouting" dorsal fin that, for now at least, has a very characteristic lean, making him easy to identify from a distance:

Soon after we found them, the whales started a resting pattern, traveling slowly in a tight group and going down for four minute dives. On one surfacing they came up in a beautiful line all together:

T19, on the left, is the mother of T19B and T19C. T18, on the right, has two notches in her fin. It is unknown what her relationship is to the other three, but she is often with them:

Here's another look at that amazing dorsal fin on T19B:

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