Three Pods of Orca
Spirit of Orca left the dock this morning heading north towards a humpback whale known to be in Boundary Pass. We stayed long enough to get a fluke shot. I recognize this whale to be “Orion” who I had seen on a previous day. Throughout the day we saw members of three pods of Orca.
I then took my guests over towards Patos Island to see Orca. We stopped short because some of the Orca began porpoising towards us. I captured the image of one female in mid-air porpoise, but it was not focused. I do have a shot of her diving back into the water that was in focus.
A Reckless Boat Driver
On the second tour, we viewed the same pods. A couple of things took place on the second tour. A private vessel was using a drone illegally flying over the Orca. A research vessel was legitimately flying a drone with a permit to do so. Then we had a sport boat at the rear of the pack of boats take off and use three of us as his obstacle course flying by me and cutting in front of bow of another whale watching vessel, I snapped pictures of it taking place then veered out away from the whales to get far enough ahead to look back at his registration number and a zoomed-in shot to have a complete set of pics to turn over to authorities.
Humpback ‘Orion’ in Boundary Pass
The humpback ‘Orion’ had disappeared, and we did not see him again. I took my guests through John’s Pass and into Haro Strait. We scanned Haro for humpbacks for a bit and then moved on to see other marine life. There were harbor seals and their newborn pups on the shoreline. Bald Eagles were around to see including a juvenile at Flattop Island. Lots of Harbor Porpoise were around, though shy about being seen.
After leaving John’s Pass, we saw a landing craft taking a U-Haul truck back to Roche Harbor. Not sure if someone had moved to Stuart or John’s Island or someone was moving off the island. This shot though tells the story of the extra effort that needs to take place when living on the outer islands where there is no ferry service.
Beautiful Ending to a Beautiful Day
The third tour took us down into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, where we started with a humpback whale. We then moved on to the T46B’s pod of Biggs Orca. The T46B’s is the pod that ‘Casper’ is a member of and we saw him multiple times. This group was making direction changes and long dives so a bit hard to track. On the way back to Friday Harbor, we stopped to see some Tufted Puffin. The light had already left us though, and I was not able to get any decent puffin shots. It was a wonderful evening following a beautiful day seeing three pods of Orca.
Check out some of my other photoblog pages at Whale Tales.
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