Piper | Saturday, May 25, 2019 | M/V Sea Lion | 5:30 PM
After quite the soggy day, the skies cleared up significantly for our sunset tour, my first of the season! Captain Pete and I left the docks in Friday Harbor on the Sea Lion with an awesome group of people and headed south into San Juan Channel. Motoring into Cattle Pass we got to see a few harbor porpoises surfacing here and there and they continued to pop up around the southern side of San Juan Island as we made our way westward into the Haro Strait towards Vancouver Island. We were headed out to see the same orcas we saw on our noon tour, a family of six Bigg’s killer whales called the T65A’s, but these whales had traveled all the way down to near Victoria!
As we came on scene, we saw in the distance one of the whales breach twice! We slowed into place and got to watch as these orcas porpoised and rolled, waving their pectoral fins in the air. We originally thought they must have been hunting something but after we got an epic close encounter, we realized they were just socializing! We had been paralleling the animals, watching them off our starboard side when suddenly they turned towards us and we couldn’t get out of the way, so we shut down the propeller and floated as these massive killer whales surfaced while coming at us, before one of them took a breath, went under and swam directly next to the boat, turning on its side to glance up at us while swimming past! They swam to the front of the boat and were surfacing off our bow before they continued on their merry way, socializing some more! The eldest son of this matriarch was swimming with a younger sibling farther away, but we got great looks at the mom, T65A, and three of her kiddos. It was an unbelievable encounter, one that doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does, it really can’t be beat. A little while later we headed back towards Friday Harbor, riding that adrenaline rush and the waves all the way home, and enjoying a beautiful sunset along the way.