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Pair 0f Humpback Whales

We set out from Friday Harbor heading towards a pair of Humpbacks and The T46’s and T46B’s pods of Orca. Among the T46B’s we had Casper the Semi-Albino Whale. She is T46B1B and the calf of T46B1.

Gales Down South

The weather forecast today was not the greatest. Gales were being called for in the Strait of Juan de Fuca with 4′ to 7′ foot seas. The beautiful thing about living here with bad weather down south, we can usually go north as was the case today. A little bit of chop in San Juan Channel but Boundary Pass was flat and calm.

Breaching Humpback

We stopped off to see the Orca first, but there were soon too many boats on the scene, so we left and made our way over to see Divot and Stitch a pair of humpback whales that have been traveling together lately. On the way there I could see one of them breaching several times then doing some pectoral fin slapping. I mentioned we should have come to these guys first then we could have been right there when the breaches took place. We arrived on scene with Divot, and he was done exercising.

We saw a couple of fluking dives then he seemed to go into sleep mode. Stitch had gone in a different direction before we got to Divot. Later as we were headed back to the harbor, I heard that they had joined up again.

YTB 641

We saw a Canadian Navy tug YTB class. I had to look up the B. I knew Yard Tug and it turns out the B means nothing more than Boat, so Yard Tug Boat. This particular tug was the YTB 641 named the Glendale. It was launched in 1975 making it a fairly old tractor tug with Voith Schnider drive units. It did not look old though, I thought it was new and was surprised to see the launch date.

Two Orca Pods

We made our way back to the Orca pods again and only a couple boats on the scene now so it was much nicer. After a bit the two pods split up, one going north the other east. The group to the north got a hold of something and were having dinner.

The pod to the southeast of us started porpoising towards the others. There was a bit of breaching going on or as I call it their happy dance. The happy dance is when they have meat in their bellies, and they are feeling good and want to celebrate with a few breaches. Then they started making their way into one of the new squeaky wheel critical salmon habitat sanctuaries. That was our cue to start heading for home. We left Casper the semi-albino whale behind on our way out.

Check out some of my other photoblog pages at Whale Tales.

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