Wow, this summer has flown by.  And what a summer it has been so far.  While the weather may have had notions that it was spring, no fall, no spring again, we have had some amazing days with the wildlife of the Salish Sea. Well, August has picked up right where July left off.  Some morning fog, and then sunny afternoons.  And today the whales were also doing pretty much what they were doing at the end of  July–the west side shuffle!  Whales had been doing the shuffle since early AM, and as we were heading to Cattle Point, we heard the whales were heading towards Lime Kiln again.  But we were not very concerned as with the big flood tide coming in, we knew the whales were likely to head back towards False Bay.  And that’s exactly where we found them!  First we saw J27 Blackberry, who was doing his J1 Ruffles imitation by hanging quite aways offshore from the rest of the whales.

Eventually we were able to find a nice little group of whales off to themselves, so we slowly made our way over.  We spotted J39 Mako along with J34 Doublestuff.  More whales were closer to shore, but we were staying outside of the 1/4 mile west side buffer zone, so I couldn’t get any IDs.  J39 and J34 were being very energetic, with lots of chasing and playing around, spyhops, and then J34 did a beautiful breach.  You could see that this young male is starting to get the characteristic growing dorsal fin along with the very paddle-like pectoral fins.

The whales continued their foraging as we left them still milling around False Bay.  We saw lots of bait fish along with several salmon jumping, so perhaps this is why these whales have hung out here for the last 3 days?