Olivia Ellman | M/V Kestrel | September 7th, 2024 | 2:00 pm
Our afternoon adventure whale watch set out from Friday Harbor under hazy skies in search of wildlife. We began by heading north up San Juan Channel and were excited about some rumors of whales ahead of us. Soon enough, as we neared Waldron Island, we could see some blows in the distance along with some large black dorsal fins! This ended up being a group of three male Bigg’s or Transient Killer Whales, and they were slowly traveling along a smaller island. While they passed by many harbor seals on the rocks, they didn’t seem very hungry because they begin to hunt any and continued going north. Through photo ID, these boys were identified as the two brothers T60D Onca (age 20) and T60E Lynx (age 16), and a friend T69E Kodiak (age 20). We enjoyed watching the boys continue their slow travel north, and soon departed them as we received a report of a humpback whale not far away!
We traveled a bit more north towards Saturna Island, officially crossing into Canada to find our humpback. It didn’t take long for us to begin seeing some blows closer to the shoreline, and as we slowly made our way onto scene we got a great look at a fluking dive. We only had to wait about 4 minutes before this whale surfaced again, and continued to dive and surface along Saturna towards East Point for some time. This was a great way to really see some of the differences between toothed and baleen whales, especially comparing their hunting techniques and social structures. Eventually this whale disappeared on a longer dive and we lost sight of it, so we decided to turn back west to reconnect with the Bigg’s boys we had seen earlier. We stopped to look at another large haul out of harbor seals, getting closer looks than we had earlier, before finding the killer whales not too far off.
Our afternoon ended with some great last looks of the three boys traveling very close to the shore along Pender Island. After admiring them for a bit longer, we began our travel back across the border into the US and towards San Juan Island once again. It’s always a joy to have a trip start and end with killer whales!