The waters surrounding the San Juan Islands are called the Salish Sea. And here we are lucky enough to have more than a few members of the Cetacean family (whales, dolphins, porpoises) stop by every once in awhile. Most folks come to see the famous and charismatic Orcas, which are the world's largest dolphin, but we have a few more fun members that are just as wonderful to see. Going from largest to smallest there is the Humpback Whale, the Minke Whale, Dall's Porpoise, and the Harbor Porpoise.
And on Thursday we saw all save one...
It was a cooler afternoon when Capt. Jim, me, and one family headed south on the Kittiwake. We were going to the west side of San Juan Island to look for the Southern Resident Killer Whales. We soon saw the dorsal fins in the distance and as we neared False Bay it was apparent that we had found K pod! K pod is one of the three pods in the Southern Resident community and they currently have 19 members. They were hunting for their favorite food, Chinook Salmon up and down the west side. We luckily got to spend a lot of time with two particular families, the K-16's and K-14's!
As I mentioned before, orcas / killer whales, are the biggest dolphin and in the world of cetaceans aka whales we like to look at their mouths a lot to see similarities and differences. The orcas have rows of sharp, cone shaped teeth, the next few whales won't.
After visiting with the orcas, we headed south to look for some other wildlife. And soon as we were looking at a bait ball both a Minke Whale popped up and few Harbor Porpoises. Minke Whales are small baleen whales. They are about the same size as orcas but filter feed using a thick, bristly mesh in their mouths called baleen. Harbor Porpoises are tiny, swift creatures that have sharp spade-shaped teeth that swim all around eating tiny fish. They usually are solitary, but this time of year they start to form aggregations of larger groups.
After watching them for awhile we moved even further south and south spotted a full grown Humpback Whale! This is another baleen whale, but instead of being 30 ft. long like the Minke, this guy is around 50 ft. long and weighs around 50 tons! That's definitely bigger than our boat. This guy was amazing to look at as he rose, breathed, and lifted his fluke high up in the air until he slipped deep down again to feed once again.
After really appreciating this leviathan, we slowly started to return to Friday Harbor, but got to see some Stellar Sea Lions and Harbor Seals on the way! What another amazing day on the water!
Whale folks until next time,
Naturalist Erick
M/V Kittiwake, San Juan Safaris