San Juan Whale Watching

This morning I received a report of J-Pod and K-Pod coming down from the Fraser River, again. They had been heading down late last night, but turned around and went back up. I calculated it out and decided that we should be able to get to them this morning, although just barely and it wouldn’t be for long. Then just before we were about to leave the dock I got a call from a friend letting me know that one of the Victoria boats had just picked up the J14’s and J16’s (still traveling separately) at Discovery Island coming east towards us!

So we ran around the bottom of the island and then headed west. We caught up with them about half way across towards San Juan Island. This is one of my favorite places to see them. They will often do some porpoising (high speed swimming) as they come across, and we were treated to lots of it today. It is such an amazing thing to watch as these 10,000 lb animals launch their bodies through the water at 10-15 knots. It was a beautiful morning on the west side.

This afternoon the rest of J-Pod and K-Pod had made it down quite a bit further than this morning.  So we decided to run north, hoping we would catch up with them in Boundary Pass (another one of my favorite places to see them).  Sure enough, we found K-Pod just south of East Point, and for a while we had a small family group all to ourselves.  This wasn’t just any group though, we were lucky enough to be able to watch K-14 and her new baby swimming and playing along with the sprouter male, K26 and his other siblings.  What a beautiful sight!!!