Casper with Mom and Family

Long Haul to Casper

Our tour today started with us seeing a couple of Bald Eagles and Stellar Sea Lions. I had not heard of any nearby Orca. Eventually, we viewed Casper with Mom and Family. However, we were in route to Race Rocks area to see Big Mama the Humpback Whale.

Big Mama has brought six calves back to our Salish Sea from Mexico. It has been five years. I think since she has brought a calf back, so she is overdue. The last calf she brought back loves to breach and it earned the name PopTart.

Our position was half way to Victoria BC when word came of a pod of Orca up in the Strait of Georgia. That being the case I took a hard right and we headed north into Haro Strait, then Boundary Pass then the Strait of Georgia.

T46 and family

It was a long haul, but we finally did meet up with the T46’s and the T46Bs, which is Casper with Mom and Family. I was able to ID Caspers great uncles, two big males T46D, T46E. The matriarch T46, Casper’s great grandmother. Casper the white whale T46B1B, and its mom T46B1.

One shot of T46E has some steam from a stack on the mainland. That is BP’s Cherry Point Refinery. I have hauled I don’t know how many ATB and Tank Barge loads of petroleum from Cherry Point and Ferndale. Conoco Phillips Ferndale is a couple of miles south of there.

Scars on Caspers body

There are several shots where scars are evident on Casper’s body. He has a pigment disorder of some sort though not a true albino. Casper is not his real name, rather a nickname I call him.

We stayed as long as we could before needing to get back for our afternoon tour. I was right back out again and a few great shots of Casper with mom and family. The blue water shots are in the afternoon tour, and the grayish water is with an overcast sky on the morning tour.

The stellar sea lions on whale rocks were all juveniles today. It appears all the adults have left town and headed for the ocean and will start coming back around late summer or early fall.