J33 Keet and Other Js in Boundary Pass

Today on the Western Explorer we headed up north through some choppy waters to meet up with part of J-Pod off of East Point. At first we thought that all of J-Pod was probably there, but we heard from Jeanne that she saw several J-Pod family groups off of the west side of San Juan Island at the same time, so the pod must have split into two groups last night! It's pretty unusual for Js to split, but they've done it a few times already this year. I'm pretty sure we had the J2, J14, and J16 families up where we were.

We got to see the whales pass right by East Point on Saturna Island, one of the Canadian Gulf Islands. Check out the view these shore-based whale-watchers got! (Those cliffs they're standing on are pretty spectacular too.)

The whales had been moving pretty quickly as they entered Boundary Pass, but all of a sudden they really slowed down, spread out, and appeared to be doing some foraging. We just stayed put to see what would happen, and then got rewarded for our patience by a beautiful pass by J33 Keet, a young male. Keet is the Tlingit word for "orca", which is how he got his name. Here he is on the approach; I like this shot because its kind of an unusual angle and it shows a lot of the setting:

One of my favorite things about watching whales is when its quiet enough to hear their blows. I've heard them countless times before, but I was still impressed by how forceful and loud Keet's blow was!

Check out the water streaming off both is melon (forehead) and dorsal fin in this shot, taken just a split second after the one above:

I still get so excited watching whales sometimes I forget to aim the camera or zoom out or do the other things you are supposed to do to get a good picture. Still, I like the odd-angle results:

Westside Rhapsody

What do I do when I'm not on the boat watching whales? Watch whales from shore, of course! This windy afternoon I was on the westside as J-Pod headed north. There were lots of swells and white caps out there, and it was fun to watch the whales lunge through them. Despite some lunging behavior, they certainly weren't in any hurry to go anywhere and many of them passed by very slowly.

The very last group of whales that came through was the closest to shore. It included J27 Blackberry, J31 Tsuchi, and J39 Mako, but there was another female that was even closer in. She never dove very deep, so from my perch up on the cliff at Land Bank I could see her underwater as she swam along. Right in front of me she turned around and surfaced once going in both directions, giving me a nice ID shot of both sides of her. Turns out it was J32, Rhapsody!

She seemed in a playful mood as she did several tailslaps both as she was approaching and swimming away. Right in front of me she did more of a tail wave, arching her back high out of the water as she dove:

This post is dedicated to Rhapsody (who is a 13 year-old female....she could come back with her first calf sometime in the next couple of years!) but here's a bonus shot. This is a youngster breaching when the J14s were going by. I didn't think it was small enough to be this year's new baby, J45, but from the belly markings I can tell that this is a male. J45 is confirmed to be a male, whereas the next smallest whale in the family, J40, is a female....so this is probably J45!

The K11 Family in Front of Mt. Baker

This afternoon on the Western Explorer we headed to the southern end of the Strait of Georgia where J-Pod, K-Pod, and a large portion of L-Pod were spread out and very slowly heading south. We met up with the southwestern-most group, which turned out to be the K11 family group in K-Pod.

I love seeing the K11s because there are four living generations of whales in it:
K11 Georgia - 76 year-old great-grandmother
K13 Skagit - 37 year-old daughter of K11
K20 Spock, K25 Scoter, K27 Deadhead, K34 Cali - Four offspring of K13
K38 Comet - Son of K20 Spock, and great-grandson to K11 Georgia

When we arrived they were in resting formation, barely moving anywhere from one dive to the next, but coming to the surface all together. I love it when you see so many dorsal fins together in a tight group. From left to right are K20 (barely visible), K11, K34, K25, K27:

One of our passengers commented on how the whales always surface in synchrony. It's something we see a lot of when an immediate family group is all together; they all dive and surface in unison, a sign of their life-long bonds. When I first looked at the photo below, I thought there were two whales in it, but there are in fact three. On the left there are two dorsal fins almost perfectly lined up with one another. Click on the photo to see a larger version:

Captain Hobbes did a fantastic job of setting up the perfect photo-op with Mt. Baker in the background. On several surfacings we had all the whales surface right "in front" of the mountain. Beautiful! The two big fins in the picture below are K25 Scoter, a young male with a fairly short fin, and K20 Spock, a young female with an esepcially tall fin. They're almost the same size! Spock was mistaken for a young male with a growing dorsal fin until "he" came back five years ago with a calf!

You definitely have to click on this photo for a larger view to do it justice. It's a shot of the whales, Mt. Baker, AND our other boat, the Western Prince, all nicely lined up:

Superpod "Terns" Around

As long as I'm seeing whales and awesome bird sightings, I figure I might as well keep the bad bird puns going....

Often while watching whales, as we were today aboard the Western Explorer, I don't pay as much attention to the birds, and just dismiss anything white flying overhead as a glaucous-winged gull. Today, however, one such bird caught my attention when it dropped out of the sky and into the water and emerged with a fish in its blood red bill - that's no gull! It was in fact a Caspian tern, the third one I've seen in the San Juan Islands this season:

But all three pods did indeed TURN around this morning. After heading north along the westside of San Juan Island they did a 180 and started heading back south by the time we met up with them between Open Bay and Andrews Bay. The whales were in several large, playful groups and we saw spyhopping, tail slapping, pec slaps, cartwheels, tail waves, and yes, even a couple breaches:

At first I thought just J and K Pods were present. We saw J1 Ruffles, as well as the J14 Samish group, represented in part here by J14 Samish on the left and her son J30 Riptide on the right:

Then I also saw male K21 (in the middle in the back) and K40 Raggedy (on the right) in the last group of whales we saw, but it wasn't until I looked at my photos that I saw L84 Nyssa (on the left), another young male, was traveling with them a well, confirming that L-Pod was present. I always love trying to figure out who is traveling with whom when all three pods are present and the whales "mix up" from their regular family groupings. For those bird lovers that read my blog notice the little rhinoceros auklet fleeing the scene to the left of the whales. I always wonder how scared those guys must feel when suddenly a whale surfaces right underneath them!

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Some "Murre" of L-Pod

Okay, okay, really bad pun, but it does describe what I saw today! After a two day absence the Southern Residents made their way back in from the open ocean and on the Western Explorer this morning we met up with L-Pod heading out from Cattle Pass towards Hein Bank.

First of all, though, check out this beauty of a common murre that was not camera shy (or boat shy) at all. There were lots of murres out and about today!

When we got on scene with the whales they were zig-zagging a lot, but we finally found a nice group of about half a dozen animals that had a destination in mind, and we were able to parallel them as they traveled south at a speed of about 7 knots. Closest to us was the 16 year-old male L89 Solstice. It looks like he's starting to get a little bit of a "wave" to his fin, too, kind of like we see on J27 Blackberry:

Solstice belongs to a sub-group of L-Pod known as the L12s who often travel separate from the rest of L-Pod. Several other of these whales were present, too, like Solstice's mom L22 Spirit, but it wasn't until I got home and looked at my photos that I figured out a couple of the other whales we were looking at were L2 Grace and her son L78 Gaia, who are pictured here with a sailboat in the background:

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"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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K12 Sequim and K37 Rainshadow

This morning, like every other morning so far this month, started with dense fog, but today it burned off into bright sunshine by the time we headed out on the water. Today on the Western Explorer we traveled north and met up with J-Pod, K-Pod, and most of L-Pod (minus the L12s and L5s) who were all traveling southwest. We were in the south Strait of Georgia north of Patos Island and south of Point Roberts, out in fairly open water that today was flat calm.

It was a very mellow afternoon, and we got to quietly watch the spread out whales travel - some surfacing far away, others mid-range, and still others closer. There was one moment of high excitement when the whales suddenly shifted from traveling south to a more westerly direction, and we got a nice pass by K12 Sequim and her six year-old sun K37 Rainshadow. Here is a sequence of four photos showing them surfacing as they passed off the left side of the boat. That's mom in front with the wispy saddle patch and Rainshadow next with the smaller dorsal fin and rake marks across his saddle patch:

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