M/V Sea Lion | August 27th, 2019 | 1:30 PM | Naturalist Alexandria
Today we started off our trip with no firm reports. There was a rumor of a humpback whale that was out fairly far south, but we didn’t have any reports of orcas within our range. We decided to head out of the harbor but within a few moments of exiting the harbor we were excited to catch wind of a family of transient orcas fairly far up north.
We decided to make the trek and hope that these orcas didn’t swim too far north. We headed up through San Juan Channel and passed Boundary Pass. These orcas did in fact begin to pick up speed as we were reaching them, but we were lucky to get some fantastic looks at them as they were swimming. Captain Pete did a fantastic job of giving these whales a very respectful amount of space while still ensuring that we got some great looks at them. We parallel viewed these animals for a while and saw some great sights of their dorsal fins and saddle patches as they swam by.
After hanging out with these orcas it was time to start the rather long trek back, but we were able to talk to our guests about the different anatomy of orcas- using a very cool figure we had onboard of an orca, and then pulled out an ID guide and talked with guests about what we saw and how we were able to ID these animals as the T36As.
We had a beautiful afternoon out on the water, and we very much got lucky that some orcas popped up in our area!
Until Next Time,
Naturalist Alexandria