[Sarah | 04/25/2019 | M/V Sea Lion | 12:00pm]
Today was the day! The day we have all been waiting for! Ask anyone who knows me and they’ll tell you that I have been talking about the day we would finally see a humpback whale in the 2019 season and that day was today!
Captain Pete and I had no reports of cetaceans when we left the dock in Friday Harbor. Undiscouraged we decided to head east, interisland, to search some waterways that hadn’t been looked at by any whale watchers yet today. As we poked our heads into Upright Channel we got a call that someone had thought they had seen a whale to the north near Stuart Island. Deciding that even the rumor of a whale was better than nothing we pointed into Harney Channel between Orcas and Shaw Islands heading towards the report. We wove through the narrow island passageways marveling at the beautiful scenery.
We briefly stopped to see some Steller’s sea lions on the rocks at Green Point on Spieden Island. These huge pinnipeds are the largest sea lions in the world, with males measuring up to 12 feet long and weighing up to 2,400 pounds. We decided to take the north side of Spieden, heading towards the south side of Stuart Island. The humpback whale sighting had not been confirmed by any whale watch boats in the area, so we slowed down to aid several other boats in the search. We scanned and scanned the waters and got nothing.
All of a sudden another boat called over. They had the humpback next to their boat. We motored slowly into the zone where the whale was spotted and waited for it to surface. The massive animal raised its blowholes to the surface and exhaled. In the duration of our encounter the whale spent time near the surface, feeding and rolling on to its side. Humpback whales are seasonal visitors with us here in the San Juan Islands, migrating south in the winter months to calve and breed in warmer waters in both Hawai’i and Mexico. It was awesome to see this whale back in its home waters, and exciting to have our first humpback whale encounter of the year!
On the way back towards Friday Harbor we stopped at Spieden Island once again to find some other wildlife. We found some harbor seals hauled out on the rocky intertidal zone, some of the introduced game animals up on the grassy slopes, and bald eagles soaring in the sky and perched everywhere!
It was an awesome day out on the water, here’s to many more humpback encounters in the future!