Elle | M/V Osprey | June 29, 2022 |12:30PM
Today we took a trip to Canada! We left Friday Harbor towards reports of Bigg’s Killer Whales near Victoria on Vancouver Island. We headed north, then west through Speiden Channel. As we approached Sidney Island, we started to see tall, black dorsal fins in the distance. We headed slowly towards them and came across a total of six whales. Brothers T128 and T125A, Flotsam and Jetsam were quickly identified by the deep notch in Jetsam’s nearly 6-foot-tall dorsal fin. Nearby, a family of four, the T137s, was also spotted swimming along. As we floated past Swartz Bay and stayed out of the way of the British Columbia Ferry passage, we watched these six whales spread out from our 9 o’clock to our 3 o’clock. Suddenly, T137A (Jack) popped up right off our port side. We turned off our engines to see what he would do next. Jack surfaced again a few yards away, then dove under our boat and surfaced again on the starboard side. We watched in awe as his huge dorsal fin pierced the water and he took a breath at the surface. This “whale mugging,” an incidental and close-up look at this orca, really goes to show how curious and how massive these animals are. After Jack left us to rejoin his family and the two brothers, Jetsam and Flotsam, we took one last look at this group before turning back south to return to Friday Harbor. On our way back, we saw a group of harbor seals, the Bigg’s killer whales’ primary food source, hauled out near Speiden Island.