[Saturday, 9/15/18, M/V Kestrel, 10:00]
On Saturday, Captain Gabe and I took a great group out on a cloudy morning to go look for some amazing wildlife. We headed up north. We went through San Juan Channel and up past East Point towards the Strait of Georgia. Here, in between Saturna Island and Point Roberts we started to see some blows in the distance. We slowed down and approached these whales we could see that they were members of the Southern Resident Killer Whale Community. This is one of the populations of Killer Whales (orcas) that we see in the inland waters here. They are the population that researchers know the most about. They consist of J, K, & L pods and they only eat fish. Their main prey is Chinook Salmon.
Today, they were very spread out into different small groups foraging for salmon along the banks off of Point Roberts. Today we saw many of J pod and K pod. We saw Tika and Sekiu. We also saw the J17’s hangin around and splashing around after catching some fish. It was so cool! We hope they were catching many fish as this is also the population that is critically endangered with only 74 members left. We after watching a good amount of fishing and splashing we left them to go back south. We made a quick stop a East Point to watch a small raft of Steller Sea Lions swimming in the water around this point. They were just resting in a back eddy and would every so often spin in the water and reposition themselves. Also at this point were a lot of Harbor Seals and Surf Scoters too! We then had to head back but what an amazing day!
Naturalist Erick