San Juan Whale Watching

We had two of the most memorable trips today. The weather was perfect, even though the forecast said otherwise, and on both trips we found ourselves with an almost private whale encounter.

This morning we caught up with J-Pod, K-Pod, and part of L-Pod in Rosario Strait. Just after we arrived, J-Pod decided to turn around and head north instead of south with the rest of the whales. Lucky for us, almost all of the other boats stayed with the southern group, while only a couple of us went north with J’s. So we had a beauitiful encounter with J1 (Ruffles), his mother J2 (Granny) and the rest of the family. J2 was doing a lot of “logging” (floating partially out of the water for an extended period of time) at the surface and at one point even did what is best described as a “raspberry” sound. It was such a wonderful thing to just drift with the engines off and listen to the blows and vocalizations on the hydrophone. We headed back to Friday Harbor thinking there was no way we could match such a wonderful trip this afternoon.

When we left the dock this afternoon K-Pod was reported just off of Cattle Pass (very close to Friday Harbor), while J-Pod was way up north. So we headed south down San Juan Channel and out towards Salmon Bank to find K-Pod (or at least part of K-Pod as I later found out) heading west up the island. As we were approaching the area where the whales (and lots of boats) were I heard another captain say on the radio that he had run across a group of whales several miles to the east of us. Well, that was all I needed. So we ran east in search of this group. I kept looking back expecting to see lots of boats following us, but none were coming. We ended up finding the rest of K-Pod and some L-Pod whales off the south end of Lopez Island. Again, we had a whole group of whales basically to ourselves (1 other boat eventually came over) and were able to just sit still, drop the hydrophone, and enjoy. We had a wonderful pass from K14 (Lea) and her new baby as well has some awesome fishing behavior from L87 (Onyx).

On the way home we found a juvenile Elephant Seal (very rare) lazily sunning itself on a beach along with several Harbor Seals just around the corner on some rocks. The Kingfisher shot was taken after we tied up in Friday Harbor. It was fishing in the slip across from us.