An afternoon with an incredible Southern Resident family, the L54s! 

Maxx K. | M/V Kestrel | 09/02/2021 | 2:00pm

    It was a beautiful afternoon on the Salish Sea! Seas were calm, the dignified Olympic mountains peered down over the islands and Southern Residents were rumored to be in the area. When Captain Solan and I left Friday Harbor, we weren’t entirely sure what our game plan was: the last reports of L54 and her family were pretty far south of us and trending further...

Olivia | M/V Sea Lion | September 5th, 2020 | 13:30

Leaving Friday Harbor and setting out south to find whales, we had no idea we would be part of such a unique moment in history. We started the long trek through the Strait of Juan de Fuca with Mount Baker peering down at us and Harbor Porpoise swimming in every direction we looked. Just shy of two hours later [so proud of our patient passengers!] we came across the south western corner of the United States border when we started...

Olivia | M/V Sea Lion | July 25th, 2020 | 17:30

After seeing part of L-Pod foraging in the Strait of Juan de Fuca on our 13:30 trip, we hoped for our sunset trip that they would still be foraging down there to give our guests the same opportunity to see Southern Resident Killer Whales as we did earlier. To our humble surprise, those Orca started traveling UP the San Juan Channel! What!! I had never heard of this behavior historically and immediately our hearts were racing with...

Olivia | M/V Sea Lion | July 25th, 2020 | 13:30

Starting off the trip, Captain Pete said to me, “Olivia, today is starting off a little weird, but sometimes those turn out to be the best days.” If he ever decides to retire as a Captain, he has a great future in fortune telling since he nailed our day on the head! A Bald Eagle soared through the sky as we left Friday Harbor and started our travels southwest. We had Mount Baker perfectly standing on the horizon, Mount Rainier glancing...

Olivia | M/V Kestrel | July 24th, 2020 | 14:00

“No one will protect what they don’t care about; and no one will care about what they have never experienced.”

-David Attenborough

I do not even know where to begin with writing tonight’s blog. I have been a naturalist in New Zealand and the San Juan Islands for a total of 4 years now and have never had such a profoundly spectacular trip as I did this afternoon. We left the dock with no reports of orca in the area and decided to go see...

Guests aboard M/V Sea Lion along with Cpt. Gabe, naturalist Alexandria and I were excited to get on the water on this rainy September day with a report of transient and southern resident orcas in our area. Eager to get everyone on the boat and ready to pick up speed we took off to go find these animals ourselves. 

As of earlier, the transient orca report had been spotted by kayakers and no one else, so we went to the general area to try and find them again. With no luck or dorsals in...

[Monday, 6/11/18 - M/V Kestrel - 2:00PM - Naturalist Erick]

Happy Monday Everyone! We hope your weekend was as good as ours, and it’s only going to get better this week! This Monday afternoon Captain Gabe and I took a super fun group of people out on a trip aboard M/V Kestrel. We started by heading north through San Juan Channel. We traveled around the northern side of San Juan and Henry Islands. Just as we rounded Henry Island we saw some blows in the distance around Kellett...

What a diversity of wildlife today, birds, seals and orcas. Just north of Lopez Island we saw a mature bald eagle (with a white head and tail) and a great blue heron about 10 feet away. Then we headed further south and saw some very large black dorsal fins. We knew right away that we were looking at some mature male orcas. We were then able to determine that we were looking at L-pod based on the saddle patches.

L-pod is the largest pod of the Southern Resident Community of orcas...