Piper | Saturday, August 3, 2019 | M/V Sea Lion | 1:30 PM
On this beautiful Saturday afternoon in the San Juan Islands, Captain Gabe, naturalist Olivia, and I took a lovely group of people out to scan for whales and wildlife! We headed south into San Juan Channel after leaving the marina and just before we got to Cattle Pass we spotted a couple groups of harbor porpoises swimming around the boat!
We continued south of San Juan Island into the Strait of Juan de Fuca where we came upon a massive bait ball and in the middle of the chaos of birds flying around, squawking, and trying to get their fill of fish, a Minke whale surfaced, feeding on the same tiny bait fish!
Watching the waters around our boat, we soon realized there was not one Minke whale, but at least three surfacing in the area! We turned our heads to and fro as the whales alternated surfacing on either side of our boat. What great Minke whale sightings, and we didn’t even have to smell their terrible breath!
Advancing once more into the sea we looped around the south side of Lopez Island and caught a glimpse of a bald eagle perched on a channel marker as we entered Rosario Strait, heading towards a report of a humpback whale near Allan Island!
We arrived on scene as the humpback fluked, which often means we need to wait up to ten minutes for the animal to resurface, however we were super lucky to find out that this animal was only doing three minute dives, fluking often and traveling southwest into the open waters we’d just come from. Through photo-identification we were able to determine that this animal was MMY0147, also known as Mogul!
Eventually we had to say goodbye to this awesome humpback whale and chugged back to the marina in Friday Harbor, spotting a harbor seal swimming along the way; another lovely day on the water!